Most read stories

Mercury Unbound - 2

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An infested, indifferent universe . . .

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.

Arcade

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My father owned a penny arcade. I worked for him every summer all during my youth. My job was to hand green tickets to customers who achieved a certain score on Skee-Ball or shuffleboard. The coupons could be redeemed for merchandise which we had on display on…

Boise Poetry Slam

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The boy buckled in and told his mom, “No mommy, I can do it myself”

Goodbye Uncle Jack

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He fought off the U-boat packs in the Atlantic — one hand on the tiller, one on the torpedo launch button.

The New Girl

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She’s new, with the enthusiasm of a new person. And everyone wants the new girl.

Lullaby for a Dragon Baby (for Josephina TuTu Waring)

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Lullaby for a dragon baby who breaks the bough with bottled fists escapes the armored cradle stealing swords from terra cotta men to slash the Ming canopy and loose the butterflies that will free Ho Chi Minh from the fire.

60 is the new 20

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I once saw a TV commercial that showed a group of Anglo retirees laughing around a card table. The slogan 60 is the new 20 floated beneath their fat, fun-loving heads. My parents are bona fide Baby Boomers. Their lives are build on credit and catchy…

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…

Dear Mei

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I planned and planned. I followed the veterinarians around and I took vials of panda tranquilizers when they were not looking, and it was often that they forgot to look. The earth kept shaking, they were hungry, and many did not know what had become of th

PROMISES

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There was a bird on the windowsill, a sparrow, its silhouette backlit by a view of Uptown. She remembered many sparrows during her forced trips to Mercy Hospital...That was all over now...

Perfect Lady

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I want to write a story about a woman who lies to men about her height.

Monogamy

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cummings starts to sniff, his usual routine. He feigns aloofness while raising one wolfy leg to pee on Eliot's sneakers.

Luminous Nights, 2

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The house where my brother lived up in the hills above Hollywood, looked like any other suburban house on any normal street Anywhere USA, except that once you got inside the house — spread out at your feet was a panoramic view over a canyon that was act

Changes

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She was sitting in her swivel chair talking to a girl who was her younger image, ... “Well, there you go, I’m a fire sign and you’re an earth. That’s just the way it is.”

Watch

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At six a.m. he was awakened by the alarm on the watch, and found he could not remove it from his wrist, though he was able to turn it off. Of course, she was gone, but had left a little patchouli-scented note on a pillow.

Shame On 34th Street

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This tanka poem was inspired by news report that the Macy's of "Miracle on 34th Street" fame has a white Santa in front and a black Santa in back.

Faith in the Rest

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She had the smile of a pixie on mushrooms in a disco ball universe, and I dug her style.

Allergic Reaction

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On his way to his first fishing expedition in the Bay Area, the man remembered the rustle and shimmer of the willows by the muddied Jemez River in New Mexico, cold beer, the clean camaraderie of childhood friends. He walked along a path choked with greenery to the San Pablo…

the genes of Edouard Manet

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was entering into a new phase of its existence, a peculiar paradigm of the wider world where, presaged by science, economic and political ideologies were conspiring to displace the old verities of religion and aesthetics, but where…

Sourballs

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Lights of human occupation burn/ in patterns like the growth/ of a bacillus, lethal and prodigious,

Cairn

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Your cairns/ are litter in the streets

Are You A Handywoman? Take This (Not Entirely Serious) Test and Find Out!

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As I was reading “Not Your Mother's Book on Home Improvement,” a new collection of light-hearted essays by (primarily) middle-aged female do-it-yourselfers, it became abundantly clear to me that, unlike the women who tell their stories here, I am not a…

Video from Cairo

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The view from the tenth floor of Ramses Hilton hotel was depressing. A restless crowd undulated between the wrecks of tanks and armored cars. JOURNALIST: Hey! I’m dying here, and you admire the views?

bloodletting and the strobe of hearts

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the injured color wheel of the world

A Drowning

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This is the record of a drowning.

A Cool Dry Place PART 1

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There are times when she is heavy and times when she is light.

Scared Of Paradise

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It was if you memorized my ever detail but not the why. And perhaps that is what love is. Was that love? I lie in bed waiting for the man who came after you to join me. I hear his heavy footsteps and know he wants to go to Hawaii too, when our bud

Virgo

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I said he was cold. I said I like cold.

Barking at the Moon's Silhouette

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We took our turn at the younger stage. One good turn deserves another and all that crap. But does it always have to strong-arm the world's latest lovers apart with so much pushed and shoved ultra violence?So far…