Most read stories

The Etymology of Fun

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Tell people of substance the truth.

We Are Not Alone

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The bank bought out the miles of land behind our property.

Crumbling Stones Crush Our Self Esteem

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Jimi and Janis remain fierce and beautiful

Smells Like Burning

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Stanley had a crush on Sarah. They were in Ms. Goldman's freshman chemistry class together fifth period. That day they were working on homework at Sarah's house while her parents were gone. Stanley was in heaven.“Break time!” Sarah woke Stanley from daydreaming,…

Dapplegrey (Where He Lived)

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A short time ago, a man who lived near me got angry. He woke up one morning and torched his house, with his wife and stepdaughter still inside. He drove up I-35 to the Georgetown airport, got his plane, and flew it into the Echelon Building in Austin.

Odysseus Remembered

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Years later Polyphemus still remembers the wine-soaked taste of Odysseus’s men. The barley and garlic-flavored Greeks. Their flesh a fibrous, blood-hued hummus. Their crunched bones releasing sweet marrow.

Picnicking In Mt. Misery Cemetery

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Picnicking In Mt. Misery Cemetery We breathe the damp shade, plum trees shining in a woodland where there are few wrong things I want to remember-- the steel fence of the power company blazing under an arc light is one. On this day of ripening fruit …

the long white cloud above my body

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Butter me up, moon lover. Remember, I was once your warm and hot goddess of flowers, washed to shore with the others you may have forgotten. Now the issue of the earth gets nearer, and we can see each other once again, if only in our dreams. Just be

Parallel Structures

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He gave her his driving range and she gave it back. She didn’t know what a bogey was. Arms akimbo he smiled and licked the China cat by the window.

Gusts

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a girl in a red cap flashes by

Good boy.

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It’s quite simple - don’t move. No fake or feint - just stand your ground. The fixed gaze, the thousand yard stare, hold your place.

A Little Man on a Rainy Corner

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He is sitting in the infinite rain and the water is making him some infinite silhouette

My Stuff

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Crass, vulgar, boorish, impaired, angry, depressed, jealous, regretful.

things to know about the people parked along the road that runs through Humboldt Park: part 20

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I traced the vein that rose in her temple when she got angry all the way along her body until it ashed out varicosely on her smooth calf.

Metropolitan

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Metropolitan I. Atlantic harbinger of this our swaddled dawn: Mistaking moon's sea sweep for this the frown The sky's plain-countenanced creatures maytimes weep Upon the surface-sundown of our lawn, When gaily surfaced for…

Edward Ogle the First

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Vundabar baclava

The Green Glazed Elephant

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The elephant was breakable and I know that my grandmother held her breath every time I went near it, and I was repeatedly cautioned that it was not to be played with only admired. She taught me in her own way, respect for it. She may have commented on the green with a bit…

Neural Tones

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--"Look at us," she murmurs. "Tristan and Isolde without the adultery." --"Well, you can't have everything." --"No? I heard otherwise."

Casualties of War

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When Jimmy – and Frank and John and all the rest – joined up, it all seemed a big lark. Little Mary – she can’t have been more than about five years old – was dead proud her Dad was going off to fight the Germans. I doubt she really knew who the

Bible Stories for Atheist Babysitters

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What the five-year-old I baby sit for wanted to do yesterday was torture his Barbies. “Why would you want to do that?” I asked.“Because we're bad guys!” said Hanina. “Can't we be good guys?”“Not today. Today we're bad…

Dina Goes to Belfast

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Dina was a woman obsessed. She had endured a three hour layover in Chicago and another four in Heathrow for this. (The flight she had enjoyed with a few glasses of red and an HGTV show about plumbing that she could watch again and again.) She had staked out this corner of…

Max Beckmann Poem

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the unutterable things of this world

Losses in Translation

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One/ can’t always trust the eye and ear// in such matters but what can one do?/ Mistakes will be made.

What He Delivered

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Living in the Death Industry Could Kill You; The Q&A

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Q: Tell me briefly about how you got into the death industry.

Acorn Gardening for Everyone

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I'd like to grow you a new flower. I thinkmaybe I just will. Right now. Here's as good a place as any. Well you'll probably never get to see it, but it will be there just the same and it will be all yours. Kind of like these poems that I make if…

The Sun's Curtains

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It must be nice not to have to worry About certain things because those things are not yet In your circle, or in your circus, of life. I don't begrudge you for being almost grown in A much different, sweeter place and time. I'm thrilled By…

Mothers

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No, no mother’s tenderness: she shows no sign of that … Do you know that she has them make their own bed? No, not the girl: the boys too! Yes, the boys. She humiliates them.

Sometimes You Wait.

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Sometimes you wait by the mailbox and he doesn't come. It doesn't come, the letter, the talisman from another world you've been waiting for, and you give up. You finally open…

Halfsies

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You and she might make love here, next week, and I'll buy my own razor, switch from baths to showers. I shave my legs in my imagination. They, like life, are smooth.