Most read stories

To Walk Backwards

12891289 views11 comment22 favs

Tom wasn’t crying. A few snowflakes, the first of the season, flittered down and landed on Elizabeth’s new headstone, christening it. Tom didn’t have his topcoat, and he never buttoned his suit. He tried not to shiver. Lynn lifted her face from Tom’s c

Good for the Gander

12891289 views44 comments00 favs

“This isn’t fair!” I rail to my late wife. “It’s all right for you, why not me?” She never answers me directly. Not in whispers, or with knocks, or even dreams.

black crescent curved under

12891289 views33 comments11 fav

I hope my blonde down still beats in your heart, and the black crescent curved under, you will remember, and I would move toward your window where my own heart lay in a dish, with the thick valley lifting. Remember, I crossed and uncrossed my legs f

air hugs

12891289 views2323 comments88 favs

but all I can give them now are air hugs

Denouement

12891289 views55 comments44 favs

No one has the right/ to script how someone dies.

Mother

12891289 views22 comments22 favs

He stood in the doorway of his mother's house. The doorway that separated the living room from the kitchen. Out of habit, he picked at the wallpaper. He had done this for years as a kid. Anytime a corner pulled up, he started tugging. Just a…

Tube-a-Noodles (A Desperate Plea)

12891289 views11 comment11 fav

I’m crouched behind my apartment window, practically going crazy.

My Old Man, Across a Hotel Pool in the Bahamas

12891289 views11 comment00 favs

Three guys playing “Cocoanut water, rum and gin” on steel drums, guitar and trap set outside on the deck by the pool.

THE PERFECT KIND OF HAPPY

12891289 views11 comment00 favs

I think of particles exploding, coming back together like some physics experiment I don’t know the name for. “Large Hadron Collider,” you say. But that’s not what I mean.

Lost Poems

12891289 views11 comment11 fav

The ride home after Basketball and a little beer; That's when the best poems happen. Poems pin-prick sharp Puncturing through dulled Senses while streetlamps pass Overhead. They find their way inside you But they don't stick. Poems left back somewhere On the…

The Sea of Dreams

12891289 views00 comments00 favs

When I wake, I wonderwhat leaves the smile haunting my lips.There is only a ghostly remnant of your eyes, your touch, your kiss. Now I long for the Sea of Dreams,but my body is here imprisoned.Awake, I cannot reach you.The ship has departed; the tides have…

Portrait without Birds

12881288 views77 comments55 favs

so Tippi has no interest

Why I Gave Up on Math and Began My Big Fat Writing Career

12881288 views88 comments22 favs

I’d met this crowd of drunken poets from San Francisco Even though this was smack dab in the middle of winter Smack dab in the middle of the flattened Illinois plains Why they all left San Francisco I’ll never completely understand But there we we

Of the FTC and the Human Condition

12881288 views1313 comments88 favs

Humanity comes without a choice

Return To Sender.

12881288 views00 comments00 favs

"...his previous prognosis of never being able to walk again has been upgraded to 'severe and debilitating physical pain and mental anguish,' so maybe there really IS a God!"

stop bullying racists

12881288 views00 comments00 favs

Everyone wants to feel like the world has lined up against them and any achievement they have been able to attain was done despite the best efforts of everyone who isn't them. That's a given. But there is one group of people who seem to have a point.

from insomnia

12881288 views66 comments33 favs

soap smells tangy, but/I wouldn’t eat it: scent and/nutrition diverge.

Domestic Tragedy

12881288 views00 comments00 favs

We never meant to gain their confidence only to outgrow them. They were once our best friends, the ones who listened, the ones who understood or sat across from us so we could see them nod. They leaned…

The Seer

12881288 views00 comments00 favs

They do exist though. They have for centuries and when one comes forward and is vocal and authentic, it pays to give a listen. How to know if they are authentic? They charge nothing, they fear nothing and they merely exist in the world, just as you and I

FULL NEST

12881288 views55 comments11 fav

Every time I look at you there are two dumb mouths that slip between stretch marks.

Here, You Are Alive

12881288 views33 comments22 favs

He doesn't tell her that he is married, and that his five year old daughter who is living at your house has a mother back in that same city

Man Cave / Jane Austen

12881288 views00 comments00 favs

They ride horses through the living room ....

My Fuji Red Banannanana

12881288 views55 comments33 favs

She had some fascinatingif incongruoustwins of swing hips.Her eyes made me thinkof opium densof fast women without a twitch,the sweet despair of gentlemen loserswith their 19th centuryhandbooks of moralityand witchcraft. But she only wanted mefor my Fuji Red…

One Amber Down, Two to Go

12881288 views00 comments00 favs

I am brave, I am sexy, I am strong

Waiting for Lunch

12871287 views55 comments00 favs

The banality of his own state of boredom, a luxury to be satiated with violence, to hack with an axe the exposed neck of his friend.

The Blood and the Bulb

12871287 views44 comments22 favs

I had laid my hand down hard upon a long forgotten shard of an old coke bottle. The cut is deep.

Dear A. Lien

12871287 views22 comments00 favs

Time is a form of sandwich. Each component of the sandwich is nestled between night and day, which enclose it like slices of bread. There are minutes, hours, and seconds. Seconds are tiny, like sesame seeds. Minutes are a little larger. Think of them as p

The Ones Who Are Left Behind

12871287 views11 comment22 favs

The women, I think, Handle it better than The men. The men just stare Straight ahead Vacantly Hollow-eyed Lonely. The women more Fulfilled by their lives, Having always Expressed their love. The men, Not so much. And find

Until Tomorrow But That's Just Some Other Time

12871287 views33 comments00 favs

Roanne awoke on the livingroom couch with the usual willies dancing in stomp time inside her. She blinked, looked around. The room was a mess, with clothes strewn hither and yon on the floor and the chairs and TV. On the walls, rock stars,…

the last day of the world

12871287 views22 comments00 favs

I thought that was the last day of the world (when I floated up near your ceiling,) but it was the first. I thought I had seen the worst. But that was nothing. I know you had no idea what was coming when I first met you. But when we looked in each other