Most read stories

Prologue (excerpt from a novel)

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The clip-clopping of footsteps now echoes from the opposite end of the alleyway, and as you turn to face the figure who appears behind you, the figure wearing a fierce Noh-drama mask, you determine that this time you will enlist its aid in decoding this r

To Zephyrus

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In a field of barley, I see you, ...

The Song of Jerome

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"My love is with eggs!"

Feeling fences

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... he could feel the pointed picket spears.

Betrayal

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My brother Herb married his high school sweetheart right after completing college. This was a girl named Beryl, whom he'd met originally in Mr. Reinert's marching band at York High School in Elmhurst. I remember one day in particular in the middle of the

This Cowgirl's Lament

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A tornado and peacock were bred in his paddock; the couple gave birth to a turquoise lasso.

thank you, for everything

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I was in life, in my dream. I was feeling around underneath your clothing. My fingers were shining in the underwater afterlife of memory, searching for those lovely nipple-sized mollusks. I lived in a land somewhere between the past and the future. Now

For J.S. Bach’s Three-hundred-twenty-eighth Birthday

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To listen is to feel embodied reason// sing and dance with consummate grace

Love Story

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You are a warm winter Despite the presence of snow

crave

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The look that warms.

Arcana Magi Memorial Vol.6 - c.3

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Mother’s eyes stared outward in a trance, on her throne, visualizing the world Azure made. Though it was right before her, she could not reach it.

Style Shifts

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Style Shifts “Oh, yes, my cousin. We were rude boys until the armed gangs started to gather. Used to be we could pass a night driving, playing our songs, acting tough. Yeah. We'd mouth off, flash some teeth, spark some anger when we felt like it. We…

Rest

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What do I understand? What have I mastered or come to terms with?

Myself Today

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Suddenly I'm not feeling it anymore. / Poetry has become insufficient. / I can't do it like I used to.

In Search of a Meaningful Moment

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She wheeled more deeply into the office towards Mason’s desk. Keith hurried to the desk and pulled the chair out of the way for her and a sat down next to her. She was blue-eyed, pale and completely hairless, which made it difficult to guess her age.

What I Learned From Magazines This Week

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In his heyday, Burt Reynolds owned $100,000 worth of custom-made toupees.

Archaeology

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I would like to go back (with spade, pick, soft bristles), and sift through time and layers, brush away the intervening years, and find: the tooth, knocked out by my then best friend, when we were seven, careening downhill in my father's wheelbarrow on Boscobel…

From "One of: A Family Miscellany"

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" History ...is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake."

A Bad Year

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It's been a bad year, People dying. Some too close to home, Some too far away. I cry down to you, In your casket, and think you might sit up. You were not sick You went in just a moment, Looking stunning and alive. Not…

And so, like a kind of molting

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So for now, let the snow fall, but let it fall gently, each flake as a soft piano note

The Big LARP

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The ambient sound wheezes on.

The Actual Poets

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And here’s a picture of you at the end of the line to the great toilet of fiction, waiting to relieve yourself, quick before the poetry gets to you. Or worse, the actual poets.

Reprisal

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Reprisal The bomb blew away hubris, shocked the arrogant bastards into humiliated silence. None of them had experienced hunger and they'd misjudged its effect. In the lobby of the palace, dirt, plaster, glass shifted, rumbled,…

Paris Love Songs: Nos. 5 & 6

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Aucune idée

Fine, she said

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A rope is cleaner, he explains with a straight face. He's calmed by the visual.

underwater with their thumbs

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And your daughter, Mrs. P, and your daughter Mrs. Q, underwater, underwater in the old swimming hole, in the backyard swimming pool. “They’ve all got children there.” La la. Yet when I’m naked, when I enter with my own body the mirror, the small sha

stung

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Lust

Laughing All The Way To The 2020 Election

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After President Trump was elected, my first impulse was to spend the next four years cowering under the bed, whimpering.While I knew that I needed to keep track of what our new commander in chief was up to, watching the news made me too angry and too sad and just too…

Highway 17 South

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did I read that right?

A Straw Grasp

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My wife, Sheila, inadvertently clicked my e-mail address, too, when she sent her reply back to him and I read her poet friend's message that her love opened the window of his heart and she replied that his words were knocks that opened the door to her being, then I stood…