Most read stories

That Does Me Good

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Your clothes had been burned and your skin washed. They kept your boots at my firm insistence. I saw them write your name on the card. The card was black, and the ink was black. The writing was shallow and scratchy. The box they filed the card into was black and so…

Split Decisions

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Many colored eyes move slow between the mirror and my heart, begging questions. I offer no explanation. None suffice to breed either my content or theirs.

Pacific

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this orient tide come occident: this roll of wreck and reckoned eyes that fathomless are found or made to find her keep within the tight shut shell in soundings deeper than the plumblined soul these western waves gone east: these…

Five Million Yen: Chapter 34

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Al-Sidran pulled out a switchblade knife from his pocket and proceeded to carefully cut open the box. Ben could tell it was razor sharp by the way it cut through the packing tape and cardboard.

Twisting Destiny

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And so, many ideas and stories and wonders crash onto the shores of my conscience...

End Game

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Where the Story LiesEverybody wants to knowwhere the story lies. Does itlie in childhood? Does it liein old age? Does it lie in anangry outburst or a stingingrebuke? Does it lie in a momentof compassion or in the recognitionof calloused selfishness? Bruisedlove or…

Edith Head's Heady Day

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Rain dressed for winter, a win, she thought

She Looked In the Mirror And Saw Something Different

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Even raw as she looked coming out of the jail, the woman left echoes.

War Story: Alternate Duty II - crash landing

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I was only allowed ten hours in the tower a month so the Army in its infinite wisdom gave me lots of alternate duty which in the I-Corp area mostly meant loaning me to the Marines. That worked out because the alternate duty the Army came up with tended to

london walking (empty streets)

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st. paul is steeped in fog. mist and rain make the north side a grainy faded photograph, almost timeless.

Ask the Language Monitor

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A woman I work with is always going on about her daughter is an expert water-skier and has a collection of antique thimbles and makes prize-winning congo bars.

The Flame Child

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Lupe drove. She didn't know where she was going, but still she drove. The Mustang whined because she did not shift gears. The street was wet from a night rain and if…

Three Easy Steps:the little genuine things in life/sauteed whole peppers/easy roof repair

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So, once, we were all like sitting around the kitchen table, and it was so kind of like an okay sort of day to begin with. We were all like a secret theater of strangers, a living children's secret circle, meeting right in…

Lazarus argentatus

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They take the blue man out on a stretcher, stiff in cyanotic repose until the paramedics shake him. He sits bolt upright, startled, confused, indignant. ‘Lazarus?' I ask. ‘Argyria. Happens every fucking time he naps on the …

Urban Skunks

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Urban skunks want to visit your neighborhood and be bold in your neighborhood.

Magdalene's dream

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That night Magdalene dreamt about Jesus.

Meet Your Happy-Go-Lucky Poet

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"Time is an ocean, but it ends at the shore. You may not see me tomorrow."--Bob DylanThey're writing poems, but not for me. Guess I'll write one for my own. For nobody that I know now. It's a pretty lonely world for someone who sings, not you, not with…

Fly n' Jelly

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Listening for a chain saw with one ear and to Todd and the trooper with the other, I’m trying to hustle up and finish my business - sweating in my coat and sweatshirt - and I think this: not so silly now, is it, this invisible or being able to fly choice?

Sorting It All Out

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

The Roses of Gettysburg

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Mothers and sons and war, an old story...

Violent Limb Part 2

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"Take the other arm, Jonas! Take the other arm," I said, laughing. "Make me a better god!"

QuaintAugust 2017

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a midge smothered in the light of disarray crawls back into the sage

Kathy

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"Happy New Year Willie."

The First Several Chapters of His Memoirs

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He went for long, quiet walks. These seemed to quell the seething rages swirling about him as he exhumed and reconstructed the truth of himself.

Twenty Percent

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That September, he had enjoyed drinks in the company of now-dead utopians.

Probability of Rain

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haiku

Not Lao-tzu's Magna Carta, lxxiii - lxxxi

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proper words fail to get proper points across . . . truthful words have no beauty,/beautiful words have no truth.

Best blurb (pitch) -- and thanks, Sally and Prickly

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The author's note explains...

MUNDO MUERTE

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Meagan rides the subway with perfect lips and deep thoughts, looking moody out the smudged window like an actress in a Sofia Coppola film.

The Sun, the Trees, the Clouds, the Grass

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The sun was a dish of burnished courage