Most read stories

Bell Ringer

13171317 views00 comments00 favs

Zal’s first day on the job they had 16 customers. They took turns crying, “Bring out your dead!”

Industrial Revelation

13171317 views33 comments33 favs

I tell my students about a timewhen seniority was told by the number of fingers on a worker's hands No weekends or overtime, children — bare toes dangling — twelve hours on the line I look for…

The Search for Pastina Continues

13171317 views22 comments11 fav

To assist you in recalling some of Episode One of - "A Poem by Jasmine Coriander-Semolina": My head lifted up slowly as I looked up through a gaussian blur of fragrant incense smoke and saw she was crying. She whispered that her daughter, Pastina, was last…

In and Out

13171317 views22 comments00 favs

Emma held her arm up to John’s eyes. He looked, nodded. “My burns are on the inside,” he told her. “I’ll never show you.”

I heard you singing in the bedrooms

13171317 views44 comments11 fav

I heard you singing in the bedrooms with me. The down I was fond of, down of your cheek, your thighs light blonde in the light. Out of the dark, sweet bay, were you like a shining rock, shining white, undulating, a thing of heat. I remember you, yes!

Stop Sign

13171317 views00 comments00 favs

Made sense then, should have written it down - But I fell back to sleep instead

The Process of Understanding (Strawberry Bees)

13171317 views44 comments44 favs

Are all my words lonely, or nearly departed; decapitated; Visible only from the ankles down, nonchalant? I Get bored. All my words are not paying Strict attention to the television. I get dysfunctional. My words, coincidental though they…

Sundays

13171317 views55 comments55 favs

Sundays I drive her to the cemetery to visit her husband of fifty years. I've had her for two, and when I tell her I love her as much as he did, she laughs. I have to hold her elbow and help her over the bumpy grass. Today it's raining and we brought just one umbrella, so…

Day Slides Like A Drop

13171317 views22 comments11 fav

later still wine parties with cucumber red and rich

Sorting It All Out

13171317 views77 comments33 favs

To understand how and when things have gone wrong, it works best to proceed from the beginning and put them in order.

A Willing Forgiveness

13171317 views00 comments00 favs

I head out the door into Blustery cold winds Walking to my start mark I begin… Expecting in moments To hear the regular symphony Of anatomies brilliant Symmetry… Then I realize In my haste I have been thoughtless It will exact a price… …

The Knife Edge

13161316 views22 comments22 favs

Max understood this perfectly and could easily picture the slow-motion buckling of the spars and the accordion collapse of the fuselage as the propeller blades’ churned up the ground.

4 Poems in an Avante-Garde Classical Style

13161316 views22 comments00 favs

For Derek, Remembering Odd Jaunts in Overtoun I here remembered how we smoked and swam Under the cadenced pleasure of our under-days, Congealing cross-thoughts under oaken breeze, And watched the Turnered ocean of that swarm Last…

When the Snow Geese Fly

13161316 views33 comments33 favs

When the snow geese fly to the warming marshes,when the ice melts on the pond in the wood,when the sweet breath of fresh-mown haylofts over us and settles on the fields,I will remember you have been a blessing,a quiet steady forceWe will sit at the kitchen table and…

notes on flying

13161316 views22 comments22 favs

Going to Atlanta 6AM Despite all the issues presented by Delta this morning (the rescheduling of my 7am flight at 1am to a flight at 10, giving me a two minute layover time in Detroit, and my eventual own rescheduling of my flight to 6am, and waiting…

Colours

13161316 views00 comments00 favs

Not yet confident enough, for example, to feel free to interrupt, to suggest, to demur; not free of his desires his urgency (‘in the morning, fiddle diddle dee, when I rise’)

Each Planned to Kill the Other

13161316 views33 comments00 favs

What was heinous about it was how easy I assumed it would be. That was truly heinous, and it was a mistake in the end to think of it that way. But I’ve learned from what’s heinous. I’ve bought a plastic cylinder filled with nylon zip ties. They’re great f

Motorized Elderly Armageddon

13161316 views33 comments22 favs

Oldies are not goodies.

missing glory

13161316 views55 comments44 favs

i found her world cluttered and noisy, a place where logic frowns

Admonition

13161316 views2121 comments1414 favs

Let routine/ propel you through/ the day after/ the day before.

sirens

13161316 views22 comments11 fav

I know what that coast was like, where you went. A coarse country filled with malodorous women that sang from the shores. Groups of nine stripped to the waist. Some with braids hanging down their back. Garden beauties. Visual porticos, with their floral

No One

13161316 views00 comments00 favs

No One The city he abandoned lies below him. It's been years, so many tears. He admires the remains of the White City, The Shed, rooted ahead. He jaunts through Roosevelt Train station, hassled by the acrid stench pollinating the area. I…

Tragedy and Wreck

13161316 views1010 comments77 favs

By the time the third car disappeared, Bud had noticed sudden lulls in the breeze, rain microbursts from otherwise blue skies, cold humid calms that trailed him around the junk.

The Meaning of Salvation

13151315 views66 comments44 favs

I descend to my grave / where I will unbend / until the Coming of Christ

The Magic Dolls

13151315 views11 comment00 favs

Trees gaining maturity that waited in the sun, in the bursting mornings and long afternoons, became restless now in new night textures. Sometimes the wind that came before the storm seemed to be intelligent, and follow some unseen but labyrinthine pathway. But now it…

Be Careful What You Wish For

13151315 views33 comments44 favs

I got my new dog today, a toy terrier, as advertised, from an online retailer, and printed him or her, I’m not sure which, because of an inherent glitch built into the system, on my new 3-D printer,

Five Million Yen: Chapter 38

13151315 views00 comments00 favs

Inspector Paumé hung up the telephone. He looked at Dan Arris, who was staring out the window, shook his head and walked into the bathroom one more time to gaze upon the naked dead body of Claudia Monschaud.

Dust Scars

13151315 views00 comments00 favs

A gurgle of sugar on bark-splotch or blips. A mess: blueprints, radar, or wrench. Lips swell neon blood. So much spit, the lunar tremors. Manipulated, blur flutter flicks. To lungs: choke on scraps of metal, lumber, nuclear. Stir the embers. She's a bone bath for…

LIES

13151315 views22 comments00 favs

When I was nine years old, I fell through the rotting boards that covered my grandmother's cesspool and nearly drowned.

Our Enormous Fat Man

13151315 views88 comments88 favs

Pity would have been appropriate. Yet, townsfolk whispered behind his back. Shouldn't he do something about it. So lazy. A gluttonous swine. Hadn't his mother kept him too long at tit, breastfeeding ‘til four? Look. Look at him now. A fat man. Our enormou