Most read stories

The Fourth Prague Defenestration: 16

12511251 views22 comments22 favs

I still wake up with a start to this day, remembering the sound of that squish. And the cheer from above of all the brutes hanging out the open castle window. And of course the roar of approval and delight from the hordes of Chinese, Russian, and Germ

The United Church of Cigarettes

12511251 views00 comments00 favs

Most keep their eyes closed. Some look up at the cloud covering the kneeling ecclesiastical trash perched high. Others look around, overly warm.

intensely interested (but repressing it)

12511251 views33 comments11 fav

whenever i see youit feels like birds are flyingin and out of my facemy head is ghost-like and birds flythrough iti want to hold the birds insidemy head and turn them intosex maniacs

Politics

12511251 views88 comments44 favs

These days, you seem to disappear like bread tasted and devoured

Mornings

12511251 views33 comments22 favs

Over the last years of her life, my mornings began when Mom decided to play. Sitting on her black, ball-and-claw stool, she'd raise the key cover, stretch her neck and shoulders, and take slow, deliberate breaths. A deep, meditative state descended over the room and…

Self-possession

12511251 views33 comments22 favs

Self-possession. He had it. In his arctic white t-shirt; blonde haired, broad shouldered, unburdened. “I will make you love me,” he had said, in a bar.

Man on the Moon

12511251 views22 comments33 favs

I even listen to the Ugly Kid Joe version. I fall asleep perplexed and disheartened.

Exploring Physics

12511251 views99 comments77 favs

Our half-life, radioactive decay, particles shed leaving dust and bone."twilight years", "golden age", "evening of life"?Bullshit. I'm not ready to stop pumping high octane.You said, "I'll take you to Paris."Hemingway's address is still in your notebook, I saw it.I'll wear…

Sunday Storms

12511251 views44 comments44 favs

Poems reflect their poets. / Mine: ugly but loved. / It is just as well.

PROMISES

12511251 views00 comments00 favs

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...

My Plastic Dreams

12511251 views55 comments33 favs

Once, in the past or future, but definitely not in the present, I worked as a transportation minister for a friendly dictator, whose name was neither Hitler, nor Stalin, nor Kim Jong-Un, but whose mustache was toothbrush, whose smile was sardonic to the p

Dark Cave, No Candle

12511251 views00 comments00 favs

Writing books is like raising children. You do your best, nurture them, discipline them, coddle them, feed them, patch up their injuries, sing to them, try to sell them, but no matter what you do, they are what they are.

HVAC is so sexy. What?

12511251 views00 comments00 favs

We had imagined making babies with ease, as if they were simply fruit- ripening on the trees around us- and all we had to do is stretch out our limbs and pluck. We never imagined that skill is involved, that heartbreak is required, and that the one simpl

Across from Margaret Atwood's House

12511251 views11 comment11 fav

Been running so long You've been running so long I bet you can't remember What you're running from

The Rider

12511251 views22 comments00 favs

"The rider rode his bike in Arizona just about every day and for all the usual reasons....."

The Legend of Knifemouth’s Legendary Mouth Grows

12501250 views22 comments22 favs

In the small towns of central and southern Illinois there lives a very indecent sort of man.

Climate Change

12501250 views1313 comments99 favs

Every year I have a birthday, and every year another of my friends succumbs to cancer or suicide. That's a shitty gift. That is devoutly not to be wished.

Timmy's Singularity

12501250 views55 comments44 favs

Suddenly, the room was filled with a screaming vortex directed at a pinpoint in the corner. Timmy's bureau was gone and everything loose in the room was flying towards the spot it had occupied. Timmy stood up in horror. He tried to seal this rent by tossi

New Year's Eve, 1975

12501250 views1212 comments77 favs

contacts, false eyelashes, strappy open-toed sandals

Happy Christmas to my quantum mechanic-

12501250 views77 comments77 favs

this elegant silver wrench/ which from the opposite side/ becomes a golden Phillips-head

13 statements about the United States of Chimerica made by the Bird King during a press conference

12501250 views11 comment11 fav

1. Jesus made the United States of Chimerica from the hide of a gator he killed with his bare hands back in the winter of '81.2. The people of the United States of Chimerica are watched over by a straight-talkin' angel with hillbilly eyes and a crown of nuclear missiles.3.…

Ave Maria: Part 6

12501250 views00 comments00 favs

“I swear that man is a force of nature.” This was her mother's way of describing her father whenever her mother came too close to the precipice. While growing up, she could never allow herself to fully acknowledge the meaning behind her mother's…

Heads or Tails

12501250 views44 comments44 favs

The man next door came over with a pitchfork.

An Uneventful Night in an Italian Hospital

12501250 views66 comments44 favs

The voice is back! That voice, like milk and honey, like mother, like the school nurse who bandaged my scraped knee.

Elite Arts Group Names Steve Miller 1st Rock Member

12501250 views00 comments00 favs

Miller exclaimed "Somebody give me a cheeseburger!"--a line from one of his hits--and members of the Academy broke out in knowing if subdued laughter.

New/Old

12501250 views33 comments11 fav

With spring rain And greening buds

She mentioned prayer in the Øilslick.xxx ZipperPoems

12501250 views00 comments00 favs

We transplant helix° splices and shoot back to meet our former selves, zip the scrolls, and save the world. Then you said spin so I twisted my jumper over and over in endless folds like lips, like vaginas, like seacreatures

The Hitler Channel

12501250 views77 comments11 fav

The sound of a siren approaches his home. His wife asks him why he's so nervous. It's nothing, he says, but he rises from the couch and peers into the night from behind the curtains. The siren approaches relentlessly. The road twists and turns and the sound fades but always…

The Buddhist

12501250 views33 comments22 favs

She is not centered, but she finds her way.

Zum is one instance of "um" herein

12501250 views1010 comments66 favs

Millennium jumped strumming lithium gum cumulative outnumber humiliated résumé jumpy instruments