Most read stories

A Losing Hand

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A group of us from work are playing cards at a friend's house, so when my brother Jimmy calls, I take my phone into the other room. I already know what it's about, really the only reason he ever calls these days.“Look, I hate to ask,” he begins, the way he…

Hasn't Got A Prayer

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This really bothered me, and I questioned my penis about it.

Sauna

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The arid paramour, your breath is hot, dry, cedar. I sweat you corpus fluids and salt and the unnamably impure.

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.

No Cheese

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My supper consisted of no cheese My marriage consisted of no violin

The Fall

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Tuesday is trash day.

Earth Day Celebration

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At the annual Earth Day celebration, Frieda looked up in the sky and saw a lone goose. It had caught her attention with its call, echoing off the buildings and trees.

Strawberry Daiquiris

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A hot summer night walks into a bar and orders a drink.

The Judge's Wife Part 2

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"Do you kiss all of your models?"

Politics

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

An Uneventful Night in an Italian Hospital

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

Prairie Flowers

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As a kid he had run away from the family farm and shoveled coal back East to put himself through college. Now he was just another old man in a nursing home, desperate for a drink, his blue eyes bleary, a sticky goo filming at the corners of his lips.

The Glass Bowl

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I caught a fragment of a charged argument as I passed them. The young man said, “Well, I am talking about love.” And the young woman with equal volume checkmated with, “Well, I am talking about money.” Though their lives were none of my business, this exc

Trailer Park T'ai Chi Brings Wisdom of Orient to Midwest

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He adopts a stance known as Part the Wild Horse’s Mane but calls it a different name--the Part the Hair of the Skanky Barmaid for a Bleachjob position.

A Lapse in Concentration

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[...] A crimson post-it note/ illustrates the squiggle of a resting pulse wavering/ near the broken pencil leads and whorls of/soft wood which may be classed as evidence.

It's the New Age of Bullshit

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They’re young and haughty. 27’s still a long ways off. They read about the famous, not the dead. Dusty dragonflies will not land upon them, and they are really only in love with the dishwasher. Now there’s a problem. Poetry is dead,

Sunny And 78

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Tombstone is a tongue of stone in the mouth of the desert. The desert is a living entity. It speaks. It speaks with a tongue of stone. It says: Tombstone.

Visiting Mom's Family in Oklahoma

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The strangers say hi at the Piggly Wiggly grocery stores, compliment my gold necklace, tell me I'm as beautiful as a Southern Belle, ask where I got my Gucci shoes. “Wow, New…

Everything Foreign

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In college, I made friends with my Jewish roommate. Her name was Leah and she was from Brooklyn. When she asked me home with her for Thanksgiving, she mentioned we could go to synagogue together. I asked if there would be other black people there. "No," Leah…

Three Winter Sketches in Honor of the Vernal Equinox

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an almost perfectly symmetrical/ Cheshire grin of a moon tonight/ above the iced roof of the house

She mentioned prayer in the Øilslick.xxx ZipperPoems

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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

exile on and off the road

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had I gotten home without knowing it? well . . .

Song Against Unwarranted Cheer

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If I should stumble into cheerfulness/ remind me of all the business models

Walls

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No one would have picked me out of a crowd as the morbid one, but it was true that thoughts of easy exits floated through my consciousness regularly. I did my research—the easy methods, painless, guaranteed methods—and felt prepared to do, well, w

Mating for Life

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Mari thinks that's all fine and fucking dandy.

The Harrisburg

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“Gliese Base Twelve, come in. Gliese Base Twelve, this is the Harrisburg. We have a level five emergency. Requesting immediate assistance.”

The Fine Madness

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A phrase, a sentence, a stanza,/ sounds among the sums and lists/ and starts a scratched cascade/ of syllables and other approximations--

Excuse Me, I’m Writing a Poem Here?

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I’m up to my kneecaps in mockery and swill, and … Excuse Me, I’m Writing a Poem here? Thank you. Sheesh! As I was saying, I’m up to my kneecaps in mockery and swill. And I meet someone who names all his fish after people he doesn’t l

His house

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His house incubates memories. As he sleeps, they hatch.His house is neither here nor there. It occupies a space between watchfulness and insomnia. Grey birds nest on its roof.His house is a refuge from everything except himself. The floor, walls, roof are fat with him.…

lucy, the ghost who liked it

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lucy had simply taken a kitchen knife and removed the outer layer, the layer of things people notice