Most read stories

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.,

reality concedes, for once

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beckoning with citrus streaks blue cobbled streets/and stuccos lit with gold lamps guide strollers here/to Place du Forum in Arles and this café . . .

Window

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Seen from the window, …

Naked Coffee

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My wife makes coffee naked. Didn't used to. Back then, before the accident, she hated her body. Says that's why she gave it to me. She's serious about it too. The coffee, I mean. Developed a whole ritual around buying, measuring, pouring. Every day it's the…

Dating My Terrorist

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“Maybe you should consider dating your terrorist,” my dad said to me. “Most terrorists, I think their problem is they can’t get a date. "

Autumn apocalypse

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Beneath maples, oaks, and birches/an autumn apocalypse empties unruly brightness

Junk Pulse

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Me included...

Music That Tastes Like Blood

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It is your music that makes me want to crack open my ribcage and rip out my heart as it still beats, to cauterize my carotids, and shove the mechanical insides of a clock into my thoracic cavity.

The Sky Just Now

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has somehow gotten off its swaddled behind and put on its next new face, your own dipped in glass, of many green eyes for simple fair measure , lifting up my own morning lids with softly pulsating …

The Scripture of the Mountain

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Abstractions excite me. I can't say why. There are treasures in the mountains. Extremities and peaks. Romantic cures and the curious juice of blackberries. The truth and authority of rock. It feels impersonal, and tilts into eccentric configurations. What is purpose?…

Head Over Feet.

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And if I lived a thousand lives...

Friday 13.10.1307

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This is a warrant for your arrest.

No Place Like Home for the Holidays

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Lu loved his mother, but her anxieties nagged at him like poison ivy. You can't avoid scratching it, but the more you do, the worse it gets.

Strawberry Swirl

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Keisha selected a strawberry swirl cupcake from the waiter's tray, so pretty, from the hottest, coolest, newest patisserie. Moist strawberrylishious cake, swirly pink frosting, sprinkles. Keisha was one lucky lady, scoring a bizdev gig at recession-proof…

Never Said

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We're at the Park Diner. My dad Tommie is sitting across from me. He looks haggard, tired. His skin is pasty and washed-out. He's not talking, so I'm not talking either, but it doesn't matter because it's hanging there between us.Cancer.Motherfucker.“Don't look so…

Black Hole

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The falling may continue// forever.

The Noise

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I'm hearing a noise. I can't see it. It's hiding and seems to be coming from the other side of the creek. With boots on I slowly wade across. The water makes its light lapping sounds. Reaching the bank, I search for the noise. It must have a face, suntanned and warm, that I…

Blind date

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“I'll have the Ribeye cooked medium rare,” says Bill, who looks over at Julia, blonde hair and disarming smile, and he thinks that she's not bad for a blind date. He doesn't like the way she butters her roll, however, and it agitates him that she spreads…

James

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And I mean part of me wanted to let him eat me, I thought maybe I owed him my body because I couldn’t enter his mind and I really wanted to on some level but we both knew that him eating me would just make us both feel awful—him because he’d wake up

The Green Eyed Lady in the Glass Café

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Is this sought sea dream of the Arctic fox? The green below the circles of the white, above her eyes? On Formica tables where the woman smocks beneath glass borders of their vacant smiles, they pass by windows formulating styles,…

Southbound

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Maggie leaned her forehead against the cool glass of the Greyhound bus window. Over the river and through the woods, she thought watching the snow west of Interstate 95 melt away into skinny pines and palmettos. Brunswick 2, Jacksonville 70, slid by riding a …

Story Story

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It was one of those sweltering afternoons that San Diego endures only several times a summer. I'm riding on El Cajon Boulevard, with my friend John in his old Chevy pickup. John is a lifelong San Diego resident and fanatical Charger backer. He's talking up some…

An Essay on People who Behave in a Slimy Manner

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Once upon a slime there was an Edenlike place that existed in outerspace all by itself. It was lonely, this little rock in space

creation

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Leaving another seemingly pointless day at the office. 4:55pm. Winding through the office parking lot; turning right onto SE Convenience Blvd; inevitably pulling up to a red stoplight at the Orlabor intersection.My windshield is dirty. Speckled with thrown-up slush from…

Taking Leave

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A walled city doesn’t let you out any more easily that it has let you in earlier.

The Museum

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Flicking through the sheets on her clipboard, Evelyn double checked the address with the mismatched numbers on the letterbox. Its mouth was a rusty, gaping grin like it had lost its dentures.

Too Much Information

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He couldn’t dredge up a single memory about the sex.

An Orb for a Better World

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Max sighed. Solving for x was boring, so mind numbingly boring that he didn't notice the flickering blue light hovering in his room. It crackled and popped, growing until a shimmering rectangle stretched from floor to ceiling.A hand pushed out from the rectangle, and a…

Father's Day

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“What do you want for Father's Day?” she asks. “Sex,” he says, his mouth curling at the corners, “and a bottle of Shiraz.” …

July Night At Greenlake

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In the vaultwhere no one had daredsince your first stillborn screamsI swept out your deadThe gnawing thingsboneless and dustyand stinking of churchesYou came to me thenand I took youthere in the shadowsunder the tree on the grassnear the reeds by the lakeI dived in your…