Most read stories

The Weird Gods

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"The weird gods climbed down from the moon, past low-hanging clouds and upon leafless treetops. Their unusual boots first touched ground in a parking lot in the city. The snow crunched."

Aluminum Canoe

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"Don't stab me with that," says John.

Just Wondrin'

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Ever had the occasion to wake up look at your watch and see it's five-thirty in the morning — after sleeping on the couch all night? Ever then gone to take a leak, trudged down the hall, cracked your bedroom door to check on your wife and found a portly, balding man…

Because we cannot know

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Because we cannot know, we keep walking, keep getting up each morning, feeding the cat, drinking coffee. Because we cannot know I'm drinking coffee that morning in Thailand, not on the beach but just off, because there is only one spot where you can get real coffee,…

The Budweiser Sign and the Ghosts of Saturday Night

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It waited and witnessed the seasons complete a grouping and form a year. Then it watched them do it again. Winter, spring, summer, fall. It watched from the inside of course. But it could see. Big sliding glass doors and long and wide windows stayed the course also, way…

Sleeping Bag Whiskey

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indelicate, as everything arrives at once.

Selling A Wedding Ring

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I somehow ended up with my father's second wife's wedding ring. Although it could actually be his third wife's wedding ring.

How to Get Fans For Your Band (or book, start-up, app, whatever)

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You’re finally in a band that can get through a rehearsal without someone strangling someone with an amp cord over creative differences. No one’s in jail, rehab, or MIA from a multi-day booze binge. The group has laid down a few quality tracks that don’t

Helen Says (from FATHER MUST)

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Masking. Helen says not to think of it as covering or disguising or concealing. Helen says to understand it is not to take it as something put up front and over like a mask. Helen says it’s not like that...

Legs

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Rachel Stevens is an attractive woman I notice her long fair skinned legs and think that She must wear sun block to live in Arizona And have skirts like that. Today she invites me inside, She says she has a light bulb for me to change — up high. In a friendly…

Beasts of the Talent Show

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Finally my daughter emerges from behind the silver curtain, riding piggy-back on a gigantic proboscis monkey. She's preoccupied by his nose, and wrings it like a wet dishrag with both hands. If it hurts he's not showing it.

Four: Of Moths, Poets, and Streambanks

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“And what kind of man would prefer all these dusty old books to my physical form? Who would memorize archaic incantations, when he could be whispering in my ear? Why search for the ancient splendors of metaphor, when one could be searching for the ...

The Kill

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I kill because I can’t stop. I kill because I can.

Caterpillar on a Chalkboard

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What do you want me to tell you about this next full moon cycle that you don't already intuitively seem to have touched upon in your latest bout of almost there dreams? It too will pass? That it is a totally different unfair animal from the repellent one already…

the first time I met Terry

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I remember the first time I met the virgin, Terry (not Mary.) She was in the back seat of an old Plymouth convertible with its top down, jam-packed with raucous high school girls vying to see which one of them could be the most loud and obnoxious, and w

That's Unethical!

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My husband says you don’t have to tip the owner of an establishment, just employees. I never heard of that rule, and suspect it is another example of him just being cheap.

Hollywood Forever

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Johnny and Dee Dee Ramone crack open an Old Bushmill’s and offer John Huston a pull.

Quatrains Written on Stolen Time

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It is the fragrance of decay/ as paint, polymers and dyes/ outgas molecules of themselves

2 Good Hubcaps

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I got 2 good hubcaps I'm feeling kinda low Instead of tooling down the highway I been going really slow Don't wanna lose another I can't afford that now Just passed my country store And hit my cousin’s cow How come I still keep drivi

Tomcat

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And, if you look real close, you see there’s a bullet hole next to his left ear. A stray one went past his head and straight through Santa’s heart.

No Prada, No Burberry, No Gaston Lauvert

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Although it was unlikely that she would witness mobsters racing up or down Wabash Avenue with guns ablast, she paced behind the hotel's ground-floor glass eyeing traffic for fifteen or twenty minutes . . .

A Story with Tahini in It

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"What do you mean..."

conversations with the psychic

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She told me in all my past lives I’ve always been a woman, and I was stuck in this relationship and you weren’t coming back, so I should just move on and get over it. I was a little sad, but yeah, I knew I was going to go back to her one more time, just

Gulf War

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Someone's ass should be kicked.

Eighth Wonder of Mississippi?

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Lula’s fried chicken should be served on the hem of Jesus’s robe rather than out of a styrofoam box. It’s so good that I kept glancing at the little tray on the steam table, hoping to be hungry again, ready to yank pieces out of the grasp of strangers, to

Prologue - On the Lips of Children

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Their tongues were dry, her milk was gone, and the last bit of water in the plastic jug had evaporated.

Lockdown

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That son of a bitch locked me in the house again. Come over and knock in a window. One of them by the roses; he won’t see. Be a dear.

ancients

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rheumy eyes wink, gnarled hands pantomime

20th Century Boy

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The night I screamed you out of my life for good, I fed your confettied photo to swirling toilet, a ticker tape parade and dead fish burial rolled into one. Later I found the box, a jiffy…

Assiduity Twenty Four

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The grand piano, . . .