Most read stories

It Stops

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We made our escape on grimy streets under skies filled with crows, flapping like litter in the wind.

War Nurses and Lost Fathers - For Memorial Day

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I have been mother to a hundred soldiers, holding their hands barely knowing their names

The Uninvited Guest

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The first time I see her, she is slouched in a tire swing, pushing off with one foot and dragging the other beneath a dying pecan tree that probably hasn't made a nut in 20 years.

Valley Rugstore

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He hunched low and forward on his bike, his 14-year old self, flying down the dusty back roads of this Great Midwestern Land, his head full of the smell of the algebraic girl he sat behind in math class just hours ago.

Snatch XI

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Public voice when he's tense.

Hobo Junction

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“How much is stuff worth? Stuff man! Bling! Cargo! STUFF! What's it worth to you? It ain't worth a shit, man! Clean clothes! Comfortable shoes! A ride! Those things are important! But they’re only stuff.

My Voyeur Life

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It's the way an earnest five-year-old boy pronounces every single letter as he whispers. Something about octopuses, something else about peas.

Son of Uncle Sam

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He’s hooked on the pinball / excitements of adolescence

Requirement

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She sits at home, on the floor of the kitchen, bathing her stuffed animals in molasses to match the ones on the news.

Eviction

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Tell me your hero and I'll tell you what's cooking with you...

Coffee

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I hate walking into restaurants and cafes by myself to meet someone. I always feel awkward, as if no one will claim me. I'm hanging on the threshold now for an agonizing few moments scanning the room until I see my friend.“Hi!” she says, waving her cup at…

The Toy Store

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Figures are a strip tease.

Greyhound

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I stare, out a dirty window, / into the sanitary blackness.

Traces in the Winter Sky

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Exhaling slowly and deeply, Tyler settled his back in against the saddle of the tree's broad trunk and let it all go.

Boys of Summer in Yonkers (Memoir Excerpt # 1)

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Boys of summer in Yonkers played stickball and baseball.

Role

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The pieces of bread dipped us humans in cheese, the cheese made by cows from our milk.

Seven Haiku for Sad and Scary Times

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The Cheshire grinning/ moon cups itself to capture/ Venus should she fall.

2010; What I Wanted

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You can't always get what you want, and fortunately, that's sometimes a good thing.

Y.

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We are the generation who tattoo our stories on our bodies, who pierce what appears impenetrable; we fly our scars like pennants.

Lying to the Boss

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I was having festive sex flashbacks and wasn't thinking sharply.

The King's Largesse

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This little town lost its mill...

No Goodbyes

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She walks through the house she’d bought. The filth and the stench of mould nearly make her retch. Dead fleas line the windowsills, the dressers, the floors.

The Boys

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The Boys The Boys, they call my brothers in the neighborhood, or Those Boys. The Taylor Boys. Sometimes, Mom calls them Thing One and Thing Two, like in The Cat in the Hat. Those bad boys. Nobody has brothers like my brothers, kicked off the school bus, barred…

5” X 6” In A Sturdy Frame

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The first morning we met—I remember the rain, soft the way I like it—was a series she later attributed as a fourteen-frame sunrise.

Z Machine

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I'm afraid to find out what my spirit animal is

Big Secrets

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O’Malley imagined the blissful, narcotic innocence of Toby’s world where soft-shell crabs crawled into people’s mouths and hummed a happy tune as they were chewed and swallowed.

Dream of Burying My Grandmother Who Has No Grave

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We buried her upright, in the stance of warriors.

This place exists outside of time

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I'm Icarus in Brueghel's painting. My wings as it turned out were made of wax. Mothers, tell your daughters this truth. You cannot fly so close to the sun.

King boy

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“He had emerged from slavery, -- not the worst slavery in the world, not a slavery that made all life unbearable, rather a slavery that had here and there something of kindliness, fidelity, and happiness, -- but withal slavery, which, so far a human aspiration…

Things I Should Have Done - #2

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I do not trust Shay anymore.