Most read stories

"I Am Vertical"

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"Tonight, in the infinitesimal light of the stars,/The trees and flowers have been strewing their cool odors./I walk among them, but none of them are noticing."

The Weight of Water

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Water and its damages followed Bianca. Every time she looked up. Everywhere she looked up. Up up up up. Water stains, in darkening whorls, curling across the drywall or fiberglass panels, filling them with rot and mold.

Warning: Mud Makes Me Horny

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One day I was sucking down the HG French Vanilla, and the next day my body plugged itself into some universal energy grid. Like some unseen force had snuck into my body and somehow a biological experiment had gone terribly wrong. The unintended result was

Cheat Sheets

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I decided to cheat on my husband the day the washing machine broke. It was Darrell's fault, anyway. If he hadn't tried to wash the dog in the Maytag, none of this would've happened. It just goes to show that a man who forsakes the normal use of a househol

Irreversible Dad

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"It's irreversible."

Salmon of Wisdom (novel excerpt, Jimmy Gollihue)

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Honey, you eat this salmon, now

Gold

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He entered the kitchen, carrying the silver metal scuttle filled with coal. The draught brought in the scent of woodbines. She paused her work, her hands resting inside the bread dough, and breathed deep, having…

Celluloid

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Mina stumbled and fell headlong into her apartment, smacking her knees and palms on the hardwood floor.

Bad Marie (An Excerpt)

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Marie knew that she should get out of the tub. She understood that Ellen was at the point of explosion. But Marie was too invested in imagining the picture she made at that very moment. As if through Benoit Doniel's eyes. As if it was a scene in a movie.

(Like a Pop Song) This is the Head of a Sunflower

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This is the head of a sunflower as well as the butt of a beetle as well as the membrane with its busy veins of traffic between sky and cloud as well as the upside down skeleton of a raindrop as well as the groove twisting in a line around your sweet kissable…

A Caregiver's Homage To The Very Old

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When you take her grocery shopping take a list and make her stick to it as she forgets and duplicates a lot She is also very generous and will insist on buying you something I think she cannot live without fresh flowers or plants that are bl

In the Dillard's Parking Lot

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My niece Katie is wailing outside for all the world to see. We are standing in the Dillard's parking lot and she is drawing everyone's attention. Well, everyone in a 46-block radius. It has just been that kind of weekend--a wailing weekend. My sister-in-

Godot is a Heartbreaking Figment

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Godot is on the way.

Due to the volume of submissions

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Somebody pushed the automatic fuck-you button today, not the due-to-the-volume-of-submissions-we-receive button, nor the it-does-not-fit-our-editorial-needs button;

The Big Tits of Beth in L.A.

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Next, through my grad student apartment at Verano Place, came Beth. Big tits you could suck on all night long, just don’t touch Pussy. Beth held me all night one night when I was totally freaking out after smoking what I thought was normal dope at a poetr

The Death of Your Brother

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Suddenly a downpour erupted again, just like it did earlier in the morning. Clouds came out of nowhere, and it became a deluge. It felt like things including our tiny trailer were going to start floating around the nudist camp. Gina held back the little c

Oops

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Ok so oops. I messed that up. I made it sexual when it was sweet. Oops. I swear it was the beer. Ok I lie. I always lie.

Woman Life

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She remembered/Before the menses

Shluha Vokzal'naja (Train Station Whore)

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In my room is my младенец, I mean my little one. She is hungry, Sucking dry air. My молоко, that Says milk, is not good. I can’t make.

So You Want to Write a Screenplay for a Children's Movie

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For starters, someone must be dead. That’s the golden rule to remember here. And if that someone is mom, you’ve got a hit on your hands.

The Gunman and the Ape

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You marched in step from 9 to 5, kept perfect pace, pledged allegiance to enforced mediocrity, until the day they let you go—the day you knew that you were never Buddy Holly on their plane; just another passenger, brilliant but doomed.

10,000 Dollar Pyramid

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During the course of her life Cleo screwed every single President.

My Crush on Daniel Ortega

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Time advances. One space between words, two between sentences. When I'm not working, I rehearse the language of newspapers: teez, pica, reefer, jump, hed, sig.

The Boy who killed Christ

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He was on his way home from school on a dank winter afternoon when the attack came from nowhere, launched like a missile across the Gaza Strip. Suddenly he lay on his back with Jonathan Love pounding him in the face.

Coping Stones

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Cahill—Dr. Cahill to those who knew him in his small town in Maine—had decided that his screened porch should be relocated. Wouldn't it be better to winterize the current porch, adding a door at the far end which would lead to a new, smaller porch,…

Where's the show?

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Henry noted the live hips rubbing against his and thought it cool. It was not often that parts of the female anatomy made contact with his own, still mutating, parts and so there was a brief thrill of the unknown spiking along his vertebrate, small explos

Brother

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My brother was the catcher, and we were having sex. I was waiting to be scared. In our act, he would swing upside down from the bar, hanging by his knees, his arms extended, and I would fly into his chalky grip.

Garden of Allah

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(after Joan Didion) (after Charles Dickens)The car is guttering and at first I do not hear him clearly. The antenna is broken and the wipers are loud. he comes in better when I'm off the freeway. “We must forget about material things.” …

For Carol Novack

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Touching one of these special stones will bring out your own unique song.

Pieces of Lou, part 1

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Camper Stacks arrived at the offices of BURN magazine on January 14, 1989 in a state of unaccustomed joy: Lou Reed was going down.