Most read stories

Spoke

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Laurel's new bike is powder blue, with silver tassels on the handle bars. Jenny's mouth actually waters at the sight of it, as though it were a fresh loaf of bread or a perfect, juicy orange. “You can ride it if you want,” Laurel…

The Finding Smile

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My mother gave her all to convince him to be a politician. My sister begged on bleeding knees for him to give her head. I just needed somebody to help me find things.

More Of My Dark Job History

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In my 14 to 15 year old life in the late 50s I worked as a clean-up boy in the neighborhood butcher shop up on 5th. Ave.,

In Knucklebones, This Is What We Keep

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Outreach the ostrich

In Real Time

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We are the same shits/ we were in the Bronze Age

Small Ghosts

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the mother tells her child the flashes at the horizonare fireworks, not bombs, so he will not be afraid.at night he curls by the door or else he follows her to a different place. he is quiet, then. as if he knows the secret challenge.better if he and all the others…

Dumb Luck and the Fall of Empires

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At some point we all reach the end point/ of something. Something important/ if only to our fragile self esteem.

Dear Poet(s) of Tomorrow

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you'd do him more of a favor to kill him, than place upon him the burden of such an abrupt change in travel plans.

Mercury Unbound - 5

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As the music concludes, I'm finally in control of my emotions . . .

One Kiss

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"It was one kiss. No tongue. What does that even mean?" Lindley tried to see Leah as any other patient, "What do you want it to mean?" "I don't know," Leah whined, tears welling, "something, maybe. You know I hate surprises." Her sister was not another…

First Rain of the New Year

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Compartments trickle together/ in light diffuse and unreliable./ Fortify yourself against the day.

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

Fulton Flapper

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The Italian was late. She was supposed to come into the store, meet him in the back, and arrange to take the last of his liquor.

Apex

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You left paint and blood smeared on the wall.

Ineluctable

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I attended the burial of our affair when I found the notebook-maybe it should be called her diary-she had foolishly forgotten, leaving it on the deck of my beach house where she stayed while I was on that short trip to Chicago and I was numbed at first, unsure how to…

The Exhaustion of Dreams

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I like it best when I wake up And the wild rain of dreaming ends.

The Old Man and the Cigarette

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Flicking the cigarette into the river the man's face becomes soft, as if waving goodbye to the only real attachment that he has felt in decades.

Houses Are Havens and the Outside Plans Your Destruction

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The first of the fires that started by the river in the abandoned mills were so hot they burned white and pale blue

Messages from Upstate

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My eyes are wide open. I look like a graphic novel. My world is black and white. I’m poorly drawn. All sounds have an exclamation point.

The Ice Scraper Symphony

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Stay tuned for my next short - Candle Smoke Wishes - COMING SOON ON A MONITOR NEAR YOU!!

Mean Time

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between

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.

Things of Beauty

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The cover features Lincoln as a woman. Lincoln as a woman is not a thing of beauty.

The Cherry

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He then spent his walk home to his single apartment spitting up various textures of red, combinations of cherry and blood mostly.

What my daughter knows I know or some likely version

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He doesn't call, not even on her birthday. She doesn't mention it or complain. She knows she doesn't have it as bad as some, even in this privileged Triangle of North Carolina. She is white and pretty and belongs to what's left of the middle…

Skin and Bones

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She lay there, skin and bones, unable to speak. Little did we know those were our last moments togethter. How cruel for her, to want to share a lifetime of thoughts and feelings in those waning moments only to be robbed of the chance. My brother and I…

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

Un Americano

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His eyes are wide then narrow and brown. Hers are gray then they look away, toward the back door where a delivery driver has walked in, carrying a tray. Nothing is going to happen today.

Mezzanine

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I am i said pursued by the feeling of being watched.You are she said -- by yourself. As in a dream, a dream you know you're dreaming. Which changes nothing.We are she said watching from the mezzanine, half-above, at once a part and apart.

Things Get Fuzzy

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We can’t just bomb Berlin or Dresden,/ Nagasaki or Hanoi, to make things safe