Most read stories

Sidewalk Cafe at Night: van Gogh

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while the fat stars stand out in the cobalt night.

Now Lay in It

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The phone rang again at midnight. Maury sat straight up in bed, a reflex from his days in the barracks. Linda, his wife, was already sitting up. In the hint of moonlight, she dabbed her nose with a wadded tissue and made helpless little noises. Maury…

The Artist Wannabe

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Hot Weather

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

Pomegranate juice thief walks home

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That is a six-word story. Notice that the meaning does not change with the word count. Syllabic count: pentameter (ten). Keep these commas.

An Alphabet

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A daydreams about a woman whose name he’s forgotten next to B, who’s been drunk since afternoon.

Lingua Materna, Lingua Imperiale

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arrogant, sullen,/ supple and ambiguous,// English seems the ideal tongue

Needles And Sins

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They've put down roots under the dome. Want to push through the ceiling, blot out the sun. I have other plans.

The Black Madonna

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They say I am filthy. On this high pillar I perch like a stuffed avian relic, flightless, no prey. The horizon before me is broken by scuff and foreign tongue, by atomized evil. Pleas, and there are many, are answered by the only prayer I know, the one prayer, which…

First Streetlight

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What I'm going to do is grab this eight-year-old fellow down the block, and declare him a candidate for this Presidential campaign. I'll be his campaign manager, and our whole message will be based on the First Streetlight platform. It's old school but very…

Survival

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When nothing's coming in All I have are fragments Cloudy memories Uncompleted projects Disappointments loom large and threaten to define me I am only as good as what I produce And now I feel empty So how do I shine How do I find the spark that…

At Sevens

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Originally published on Six Sentences:He walked out of the hotel lobby into the pre-dawn night and thought about another woman, a pretty Spanish woman, not the woman he'd just kissed in a hotel, and a night he'd spent with her in Portugal, wanting each other desperately,…

You've Got that Wrong Kind of Brain

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He and Nick got a long very well, and would speak about things for hours until the morning came; and Betsy would supply them with food and coffee, and clever sayings all the while Johnny watched it all over. Tonight though, they had watched La Rafle, and

The Roman Twin

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Reverend Peter Roman could stand it no more. He stopped his speech. He felt a fire burning through him, a hatred for humanity and all the weaknesses of beings not perfect before God. He stood a long while, staring at the congregation. Then, he slowly spok

The Treehouse

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I noticed Sean changed after his grounding. We no longer played night soldiers around the block, no longer biked to the creek to catch crayfish he'd crush with his boots. Sean stopped hunting lizards, stopped charging smaller kids toll to pass…

Interstellar Solace

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he considers the swirl of galaxies/ with their black hole hearts,

The Light and the Likes of the Moon

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The moon was out. A bouncing ball but suspended. I shall never have a baby, she said. I am not prepared to go through that pain. Also, I for sure would not raise them up if I had them with religion, which is just so much superstition. I'll be a fellow this…

Thanksgiving, 2018

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The cornbread for dressing cools./ The cranberries boil with one cup each/ of sugar and water. The aromas are nice

Abortion Mill

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She arranged to have an abortion at a doctor Greene’s office, who practiced out of a converted house on Solano Avenue on the north side of Berkeley. I took her there the day of the procedure. You couldn’t go to a regular hospital to have this kind of thi

Painted

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By the time she reached home, dinner would be there in thirty minutes, on the table. Not a lively table, just politeness, and calm. There were no issues of the day that needed discussing, no problems to be solved.

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,

Love-sad

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Then there she is, and she makes me love-sad; it's a vehement, absolute, hard love-sad no one else needs to understand, though they can see; it's an emotion so concrete it's felt from the chest, not from a tenuous concept called heart.

Frontiers Yugoslavia Thirty Notwithstanding

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Frontiers Yugoslavia Thirty Notwithstanding (after Tristan Tzara) Responsible badly countries,circumstances better to that, powerlessness.Women these gender-determined “pluralist” conditionSoviet as overall the Women societies little countries.Have official…

greta

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you knew the lightbent it in your favorleapt confidentlyacross heartscheeks and shouldersrouged chromaticincandescent pretendingperhaps the dark had no claimover your lonely clumsy soul© 2013 - Rene

Truthful Possum

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The possum is sneering with truth. I can smell the blood under his fingernails. He has seen it all, the backwoods distilleries and the back porch propane grilles. He has slept under the beds of whores and kings alike.

Aesthetic Strategy

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it acquires a fine translucence

The Nude Pianist: A Novel: Chapter 19

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—Michiko, are you allergic to cats?

getting there

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Seems hot for a Thursday, doesn’t it?

Village of Humans

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It must have been then and in those days and during that time when the grass and short brush, like so much amber and jade, emerged from the snow and the poet Li Po, who while traveling within the ten thousand crags of the Tanggula Mountains, looked up…

Laundromat Haiku

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Laundromat