Most read stories

Attraction and the Forge of God

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Being burned with a branding iron really hurts. Everyone must have voted for the Forge because next thing I knew there was only God on TV

Filtering Grace

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...She was my first, my only, she broke me in then brought me down. Alone now, I cycle through hundreds of variations of her image like a flip book narrating some abstract story. That’s all she is now to me, an incoherent melange of tints, saturations, an

Why The Body Can't Fly A Morality Play

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Everyman: I quit, remember? I’m in a twelve step program now. Alcohol: Oh sweetie, that’s too bad, we had some great times together.

Deadheading

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The cicadas hissed and chirruped until the air was thick with a noise like mechanical bedsprings bouncing for the 4th of July.

An Angel at Christmas

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Call it what you may but misfortune, bad luck, disaster, adversity and trials of different calibers can hit us at any time.We are human. We experience the ups and downs of life everyday. Out of a job, lack of money, health insurance and other luxuries that some people…

The Semaphore of Civilization

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We're alone and besieged / by badness.

Sailor & I

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We were born here. At the top of the stairs underneath a painting of basset hounds playing croquet. And a hallway closet filled with lost someones. And the police, three times a week, singing nursery rhymes while walking up to our door.

Writing 101

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looked briefly – glanced shouted loudly – yelled fell down – fell

Chapel of a Latter Day Agoraphobic

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The thrum and the thrust// have beaten conviviality out of me.

#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.

Tablecloth Dresses: Song

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I see you’re wearing your tablecloth top again your tablecloth dress to impress me and distress me with all your tablecloth positions for your luncheons on the grass with all your famous friends who found you on your ass Yes we can

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…

Puzzle Pieces

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temporary objects of desire

Me and Jim the Wonder Dog

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“Lassie was a hack,” Jim the Wonder Dog says as he looks out over fields of soybeans. “She couldn’t act her way out of a 25 pound bag of Purina Dog Chow."

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.

War ; a fragment

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Lela, my grandmother.

Check

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My toes curled together under the pathetic rag of a bedsheet, the frost creeping in through the two-inch deformity of the window on the left wall. I was tempted to sneak a glance at them to insure that they weren't black, but then decided that I'd…

Great Gatsby Roulette

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It was May of my senior year in college. Everybody was coasting, knowing what they were going to be doing the next year, or that they’d be doing nothing. Except for one guy, Tom.

Rabbit Trail

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Sorrow fences with fear and questions

Seriously?

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Did you really think you were going to cure cancer with that poem?

My Resolutions for 2015

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The only resolution I ever kept was when I said I wasn't going to create any more resolutions, and now I'm going to break that one.

This Outhouse Reeks

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The bathroom had exposed rusty pipework, A minty lemonade smell, Ice in the urinal, And a wall of stone-cold mirror. She put some lipstick on, but it looked fake under the lint-covered bulb dangling overhead. She wiped off the lipstick but…

The Giver and The Gone

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They were once a crown,of some living stag -- not quite old,not quite young: now bone. Something at the cusp of its age. Here they stand, given by a loved friendon a place in my home; smelling, whenI get very close, of time. They are shaped like small…

Tincture Shunt Lunch Box

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Most people don't understand what it's like being a pop idol. I am not most people. I am Tincture Shunt, and here I present you with my trajectory to stardom, in case you want to copy it for your own personal use. Unfortunately (for…

Five Million Yen: Chapter 71

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It was that awkward time when one didn’t know if the night’s lover wanted to see you again.

Saved (Seven-Fingered Jesus)

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Believe me, I would run if I could, but there seems to be a low haze of molasses clinging to my ankles.

Salt and Light

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As clever as clean bed sheets

Waiting, Waiting

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The fear you represent is a real drag. That's all there is to say. But like every other house on the block I have spiders in the basement who are waiting to be brought up into the golden light. These creatures only want to be good at being alive. Instead they are given…

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...

Selfgod

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Loving himself. Loved by no one. Loving no one.