Most read stories

The Mutes

14281428 views66 comments33 favs

Some people are born that way, and some people do things to themselves that keep them from talking. Like opening up a soda bottle with your mouth.

In an Unfamiliar Restaurant.

14281428 views55 comments44 favs

I find myself in an unfamiliar restaurant, its cuisine an uncomfortable pastiche of Croatian, Burmese, Jamaican and leftovers of long ago Sunday dinners in a small New England town.

Sleepwalker

14281428 views22 comments22 favs

I may as well have been sleepwalking. Either way, I had no opportunity to admire the moonlight flooding into the long corridors, illuminating the stag heads and painted cheeks of long-dead ancestors.

Trickery

14281428 views77 comments66 favs

Maybe it was a trick of the gloom.

And so, like a kind of molting

14281428 views44 comments44 favs

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

A city in the forties

14281428 views88 comments55 favs

Along the hollow center

A Next Step

14281428 views1010 comments88 favs

The first night I met her we slow danced to George Strait songs for most of the evening and when we took a break, our talking went warm and well as we sat eating hot dogs and sipping beers until she dropped a couple of bombs, first, telling me she was married and then, that…

Blood Quantum

14281428 views00 comments00 favs

I play in the dirt with cattle bones while Mother rattles the sky. She tells me I have my fathers eyes. The words come through bloody fissures in her lips.

Memoir 2.4

14281428 views88 comments77 favs

He invited her in for a Martini and she graciously accepted.

Life Among the Epiphytes

14281428 views44 comments44 favs

Have you ever seen anyone die? It will alter your life. Because you suddenly realize that anxiety was worth something after all, and was a coin of the human condition, imprinted with hectic symbols, some of which resemble cypress, others more like Frankenstein:…

Trash Burning, 1976

14281428 views1313 comments1010 favs

This time the bag's bigger/than the boy and the door.

The Continuous Yearning of Walter Rush

14281428 views00 comments00 favs

Every morning when he wakes, he lies in bed and waits for one of his toes to twitch or spasm; the moment he feels one of them thrust forward, he gains courage to test his legs. He grimaces either way: one more day of walking, one more day until loss, one more trip to the…

Mr. Sunrise

14281428 views00 comments00 favs

To a tech-savvy millennial, the definition of progress is a hands-free blowjob, and the real number is not how many men you’ve been with but how many minutes you’ve made them wait.

mondays get all the heat

14281428 views55 comments44 favs

when i was five or six/ we lived in an apartment/ and every sunday/ i'd lie on the carpet/ to watch squares of sunshine/ crawl across the rug/ while my mother inflicted upon us/ a centuries-long hour of television/ worse than any droning mass.

Everything I Need To Know About Aging I Learned From Lilikoi

14271427 views11 comment11 fav

Behold! Passion fruit!Aureolin sun condensedRolls off palm and tongue.Spurn taut rounded skinWait for wrinklesRipeness revealed, resplendent —The pinnacle of worth.

What Keeps Us Awake

14271427 views11 comment00 favs

On Friday evenings they play Scrabble, a whole crowd of them. They use books to keep score, page numbers, instead of a long column of pencil scratches. They organize themselves into teams; the English majors all together, versus biology, history and horn players. She and he…

Nine Women

14271427 views22 comments11 fav

"Haven't you ever had some little thing you would rather everyone just left you alone about? I don't like to have my picture taken. Please don't ask me again."

Hand Grenades, or The Child in Your Eyes is Exploding the Known Universe

14271427 views88 comments77 favs

There is a war, but is it not In my heart? There is a war, but You are not the reason. There is a War, but we're all doing what we can. There is a war, but it is not just Your fight. There is a war, but I Wished you still walked…

Put Your Trust in God

14271427 views33 comments00 favs

God is my stomach.

No Homo

14271427 views33 comments22 favs

We were talking in the dark in my room. He lay on a mattress on the floor. He came for a sleepover.

Hidden

14271427 views55 comments44 favs

She is alone in the ocean

Hunting Season

14271427 views11 comment11 fav

A mundane endeavor depicted as a quest. Try it, you'll like it!

A Straw Grasp

14271427 views1313 comments1212 favs

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…

Go ahead

14271427 views99 comments00 favs

Sit right down in the chair. It's a glider, see? Smooth and easy movement without that annoying head-swing you get from a rocker. And easy to get out of, unlike a lounge chair. Relax. "Reba" reruns will be coming on in a minute.

Angelic

14271427 views99 comments33 favs

Remembering his body makes me think of Egyptian cotton sheets dried in the sun. He smelled crisp and clean even after sweating hard. His hair fell in golden spirals down his cheeks, his back, over his forehead, and captured light just like the gilded halos on…

Inside Out

14271427 views33 comments33 favs

Who hasn’t at some point of the day wanted to dredge up everything in your pocket just to see what it is.

Esmeralda

14271427 views33 comments22 favs

Being an uncredited bonus composition, written in the sublimest access of divine afflatus this poet believes his lyric verse has ever known. “In olden times, dark was not counted fair”: Those were the words, I think, of some old poet. …

Helpless

14271427 views66 comments44 favs

She stiffens and blusters and roars Not like a storm, Not like a lion. Like a badger, caught in the steel jaws of a trap.

Déjà Vu Sur l’Herbe

14271427 views55 comments55 favs

While watching the ever-present crowds passing by on my insides, I noticed, by accident, a man smiling who might have been me, not sure. Maybe I’m eating soap for the first time, because I am either frothing or foaming at the mouth. An

Elephant with a little Poet on its Head

14271427 views55 comments55 favs

“Every word was once an animal.”--Emerson This circle has been Broken. The mother has Disappeared inside the wounds Of gunfire like an Eye drop. Who knows if Any of them left, crunched Down, whole into the…