Most read stories

I Waited Too Long to Remember

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We're in a sedate forest next to a boisterous beach. The sky is sea green above the trees and forest green above Sinepuxent Bay. Chaste squirrels are keeping a lookout for bad-boy gulls. Kids on circus bikes ride out of the woods into their bathing suits. The…

Apocalyptica

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Apocalyptica 1. the portent holds you while you try for solace in the bath anticipating the opened mouth the one that cannot close after and there is a knotting inside of joints and threads poised so delicately in the waiting …

Follow My Lead

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I ran down the list of reasons she might be calling. She could be bankrupt, having a mid-life crisis, or maybe had a terminal illness. Either way I was clueless, as I had absolutely no emotional bond with the woman I came out of.

The Revenge of the Dead Music

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The wind is represented by Miss Abigail Weatherspoon, attorney at law. She wears a pink feather boa and is the spitting image of Janis Joplin as she appeared at the Monterey Pop Festival of 1967.

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…

Dirty Deeds

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Mustard stings the corner of his lips. He swipes it away with a finger, and looks closer at the hot dog. The piece of meat is ripped open like a sliced finger stuck in a doughy bandage

Slightly Damp Clothes In the Morning

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It begins with his positioning.

Stinger: a Novel

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Lipstick on the bolt, she told herself, if it's no good in the slot anymore.

War Stories

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I told about the time during the early part of WW II when I shook hands with a member of the Flying Tigers. He was home on leave, and he stopped by to see my dad, who had been his scout master.

Mind Altering

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She felt like she was turning into someone else, someone who appeared normal. She would be inundated with everyone else's ideas, morphing into an insipid lemming, smiling and bantering about mindless things. She wouldn't even care she had changed...

and I used to sing, too, after sex

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Females exuding from the genitals, giving life meaning, shape, cleanness of line, purity of spirit. They may form man as the honey moans out its salt song, solitary, its epic shout of joy, the sweet science of the human form. Then to give back in re

A Few Random Things I Learned About Bill Murray from "The Big Bad Book of Bill Murray."

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He once owned a dog named Bark. As a kid, he was kicked out of the Boy Scouts of America. His childhood nickname was “Sleepy.” When he was little, and alone, he used to sing songs to God. When he joined Second City in 1973, the troupe was…

Mud

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I told him that the beehive he had for a brain was overpopulated and that he couldn’t seem to go for one minute without desperately thinking that I was going to leave him when I’m sure I gave him no evidence to that effect at all

#26 Relation>Relation (A Poem)

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Something like: Answers to questions you might not yet have? [Answers we will try hard not to provide]

Silly Old Man Acting the Young Fool

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The green on your shoulder Is worth all their papery property taxes And then some. They cash in every friendship As if it were nothing more than a Ripened apple for pie. Get rid of The thing before it begins to Rot into some…

Go Running Up That Hill

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Better move ‘cause I hear them comin’ up the other side.

The Scrawny Dog Gospel

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Opportunity, says Webster, is a, "favorable juncture of circumstances." In my Oxford book of quotations, there are seven famous lines about opportunity. Seven – that’s it! There are twenty-seven regarding failure. Seems it's been easier for the great

#53 Cut Up

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I loved her when she first came calling in the sodden dawn of spring. She was a strange and dangerous flower. Together we drank up all the money. The days staggered away like drunks lurching down a flophouse hall.

Her Smile

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The white and yellow are sublime and desperately powerful, like angry screaming over tears and through laughter or hatred. Maybe the words are about crying or laughing, but the expressions are altogether impenetrable and distant. The jokes told behind the teeth and through…

Grief Leaves the Room

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It leaves on a Saturday,suddenly, while you are raking leaves or taking out the trash.Those inevitable, boring things.You do not hear it go;it's been quiet before when it left certain rooms. It no longersleeps beside you, and you learnedlong ago that the bed was…

Pessoa

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Pessoa, wake up, I need your help!I want to be the universe, I need to be the universe. And somehow be no-one at all. I want to expand and be everything and not be tragically held by One. But I need your help, old man, because my words are not enough to make me forget that…

the waitress

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she smiled

Reading Without an ISBN

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The goal is to perform along with Jason Lee Norman--who is touring with his book of very short stories called Americas--a selection from my own collection called Country Without a Name. The symmetry excites me.

Fernando

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“It's not him,” Kelly says. “I think it might be,” says her Mom. The three of us are sitting on the long sofa facing the wall which is one …

You are here

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meditation and thoughts run in circles

I/ Robot

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in case something went wrong

The World as Thrill and Calculation

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Professor Immanuel Danda finished his Ph.D. at 21, which, according to most of his friends and a few of his enemies, makes him a genius, though, personally, he always found himself to be a scruffy loser, if one were to believe, above all else, the mirror

In This, Our Life

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Her captors allowed her the use of the toes of one foot. It was hard to pretend she was numb—as if playing an artic game indoors. With the ball of her foot, she primed the canvas. Her big toe acted as a fan brush, the rest were sable, flat, or pointy. She told…

remembering

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I remembered because the man took us to see the horses. I didn't see something that set off a series of memories. I only saw the stables and the moon sitting pensively below the firmament. I looked at these and there was spaciousness between the moon and the stables and…

how to kill a dragon dead (except)

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the worm was stabbed where two rivers branch:/who would slay was slain.