Most read stories

Wild Origin

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Seeking your will, instead we found, somehow, a clutch of our own documents; folded under a rubber band gone to rot, muddy strands nestled in the creases.

In Knucklebones, This Is What We Keep

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Outreach the ostrich

August 1976 Jefferson City, MISSOURI

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"We gotta find a way to get high!" "Shh! My parents will hear you Tommy! Their bed is right above us." …

To a Young Atheist & Intellectual with Dior Glasses

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You have such a complicated mind / for refusing to believe in God / just like any damned liberal / whose fingerprints / crowd the faces of a thousand / dollar bills / being passed around your great nation...

Skin Wins

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One day, my feet and hands got into an argument. My feet argued that they were superior because they were not only the foundation of my body, but the cause of its mobility. They were modest in size, yet supported and transported an entire body that towered over them.…

Dark-Thirty

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The smell of garlic, soy, and onions/ exhausted from Skillman Wok/ perfumes December air.

Coffee Foam

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We entered the castle at dawn. The dim light feebly illumined an array of antiques and medieval weapons. Bats dangled from the high vaulted ceiling, enfolded in membranous wings. What were once chandeliers radiating light were encrusted with webs and the ancient wax…

Hunting Season

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

The Mutes

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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.

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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.

Angelic

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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…

Sleepwalker

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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

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Maybe it was a trick of the gloom.

Blood Quantum

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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.

Déjà Vu Sur l’Herbe

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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

Memoir 2.4

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

A Record of Wrongs

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A dead deer on the side of the road and the older boys not listening to her as they stab its eye with a stick.

Life Among the Epiphytes

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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

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

The Torture Never Stops

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Who is the torturer and who is the tortured?

The Continuous Yearning of Walter Rush

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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…

Cancer Always Calls Collect -- Part 23 --- Now I Lay Me Down To Sleep

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In the end nothing could bring him back because I tried. All those weeks and months, yet all I have left are the tears and memories. He said when he asked the final questions to those in charge he was confused.

What Keeps Us Awake

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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

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"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

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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

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God is my stomach.

No Homo

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

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…

To an Overly Helpful Husband of Advanced Age

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in which a man who is bored with years of retirement poses a threat to himself and others

Go ahead

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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.