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Honey Nut Cheerios and Chocolate Milk

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Charley calls to say he hasn't heard from me. The blinds are gone, so I take a lipstick off the living room table and draw a circle around his head. I make a half-circle for his gut, a squiggle for the telephone cord. He can come over, he says, just to …

Hook

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“What the fuck!” Duke muttered, amazed at what he was seeing in the darkened store. A thin curtain of smoke was rising from under the baseboard like an inverted waterfall. It stretched the entire length of the left wall. Holy shit, the joint's on fire! I…

All You Need Is Love

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Now I know All you need is coffee

Full of Mad Hope

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full of mad hope / we dash into the street / leap into the fray / and enter splendiferous lists

Airline Passengers! Is There A Right To Recline?

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It's called the Knee Defender. But I prefer to think of it as the Schmuck Identifier.

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.

Madison Court House

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I call beauty to me With the architecture Of this place Beauty that has no doubt Been pulled to me All its life

A Man More Like Your Mother

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Does he pack you a lunch when you're running late for work? Even when you're not running late? Does he insist on regular medical check-ups, for which he'll pay because you don't have insurance? Will he disapprove of your objectionable behavior, and not turn the…

Sanguine

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Gripping the sink, head bowed, I let the blood gather on the rim of my nose, pooling for a moment, before its fleeting journey towards the basin.

another ode

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the strength in you i envy/ leaves me naked, sweating in the dust/ while you possess what ethic i pretend to have/ in the face of those who expect from me/ so much more.

Anonymous Gamblers

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1. They Don't Know When To Fold 'Em Gambling junkies are lit on losing their ass and almost can't wait to unload their money, and then reel on home and bounce off the walls or whatever. For these guys, losing's the jackpot, and deep in the hole for…

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.

lime shed

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purely fun, humane, scientific, old time religious experimentation

Penultimate Vampirekiller for 2026

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". . . Stinkin' vampires, death to all of ’em, them and their plague-festerin' rats. But the new ones, I don’t mind takin’ ’em down before gettin’ rid of ’em. —But you’ll never get that smell off o’ you if you use only one condom, I’m here to tell you . .

I Fall in Love Too Fast

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It was Wednesday, the papers had a food section that day, so the gap-toothed news hawker at the mouth of Winter Street would yell out “Foozection! Foozection!”

The Cold Bank Ravens

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In punch drunk waiting rooms... On election routes

We Should All Have One Great Love

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My dumb body that does not speak still cried out your name last night. Did you hear it, maybe in your sleep?

maybe, in winter

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I will wrap up in quilts that still smell of summer sun

A New Thing

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I am trying very hard to rhyme, and trying very hard not to.

The Thrill of a Lifetime

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I honestly can’t say, with Lynda, who cheated first. More than likely Lynda did, because I know she was pregnant when I came home from college for the summer (this was 1963) and we had to go out and find a doctor who would give her some pills to get rid

Yogurt

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Later, you've hit that four shot espresso limit; you've snarfed down that too rich mushroom korma… gone before you tasted it.

Us Kids in Left Field

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Us kids in left field steal out bedroom windows after dark to pinch hit Lucky Strikes between first and second fingers, arc the glow of shop-lifted hot-boxed cigarettes over the chain link homerun fence sprawl on perfectly ridiculous grass passing a bottle…

From The Plague Year 2020

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I went to Costco

Whip Poor Will

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Save your delirium...

A Day in the Life of Mike

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This is a very impromptu piece written at two in the morning based on a prompt from Meg Pokrass, who insisted the following words be used: fussyhairybloomingslipperyflutterdamppaleweedsyanking “Maxfuss” was his password, which was appropriate,…

The Cowboy of My Heart

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I. The cowboy of my heart rides high in the saddle. Behind him, the long tail of his speeding palomino, golden — like the hair to the girls I was later to want so desperately — stands straight out from his sweating, muscular haunches. It's time.…

A Broken Frame

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The photograph has no date,but these are my long-ago kin,ancestors just before the boat,six stone-faced on the English shore,sepia on cardstock under glassstill clear in severe, dark clothesexcept one who has been markedout, maybe with black wax,which runs to the bottom…

How to Tell if Your Loved One Belongs in the Booby Hatch

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It is well known around town that Ray's dad went crazy. Today, when asked, everyone will tell you that they knew all along he had a screw loose, told their wife, “That Mick Borkowski's gone bat-shit.” But when it was happening, no one paid it any…

Yellow Cabaret

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Hail the yellow cab the yellow one will do just fine as second condiment to the sun

EXAMINATION

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I had the idea while I was in the county jail. I would get jail glasses; I wouldn’t be me; I’d be some other person. I could pretend that it was someone else rotting away in that 8x12 cell.