Most read stories

Monitor

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In the darkness I lay waiting for the day to dissipate then I follow the footfalls that follow

The Kid on the Floor

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The kid on the floor couldn’t handle it...

The Casual Writer Reconsiders His Dick

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The casual writer uses the work "dick" often. Other words for this appendage he finds pretentious, emasculating, or too much trouble to look up. A dick has simple motives. It is an agent of birth and death, a divining rod for the dark wet.

they are light

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They are light, their souls, yours among them. And women who seduce you should understand that, and use their bodies carefully, so that you are unharmed by the night that is filled with them. The beautiful youth who would turn their flower as if you wer

Ice Box

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To become an objection as cool as an ice box. To wither the crops. To hold a baby in your hands. Never mind, the arms. We shoot photographs of you. I still believe in black bile. I still think I'm holy. This rhyme is non-violent. Snap.

Little Ditty Down

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I got caught writing poems at the paint factory several times before they fired me I got caught in the middle of one of my best lines but can’t remember what I meant to say anymore, but I know, just know it was something real good,

Robins

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Pine nerves spike and row.

Tending Toward Inertia

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She meets her old dance instructor, named Ira, in the back of a bus that wheezes & squeaks. The passengers seem to deny the small clouds of white exhaust

Under New Management

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You always liked the color of your nose, raspberry red. It matched the glittery dazzle of your rainbow hair when the neon lights hit it just right, and man did they always hit it just right, the vibrant honey-yellow big-bird frizz and feathers, swaying to and fro as…

The Houseguest

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"Who's that?" Carl asked about the man standing near the fence. "Says his name is Marty Lopez," Jake replied. "For real?" Carl moved to one side for a better look. "I know. He doesn't look like a Lopez," Jake said.

Totem Song

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Will you leave me, you, the one?

Thwart

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Daily, at 3:47 PM, below his office window, a child in an orange windbreaker sits in the last car of the T, in the rear seat, face pressed against glass.

A Question for the Gods

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She reached out her arms and spoke to the moon, "I ran from my fears, from loving too soon." She gazed at the heavens and cried to the stars, "I could not promise him all of my heart." She wiped away her tears and laughed at the trees, "Not a soul on this earth would…

The January Oak

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tiny banners, browned/ and wrinkled by time,

no one answered

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I knocked on all the windows, on all the doors. No one answered. The television was glowing. I went around behind your house and saw it through the curtains, blowing in. (I knew you were hurting.) Knocked and tried the sliding glass door, the flimsy scr

a confession

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a pit-bull or a rottweiler or something like that

Old, Broken Toys

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A boy sits in a room filled with old, broken toys. A mother is in the next room reading Cosmopolitan, dreaming of a life that should have been hers. There is the zoo and an unnecessary stroller on a very humid day, beads of sweat dripping slowly down a face. A trip to the…

At a Reading

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His wife leans her head against a beam with her eyes closed while he reads out loud. Her mouth shut tightly, almost twisted shut. She's so weary. She raises her collar and sinks further into her neck. When he shouts, or explodes — nothing. Not

Lineage

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the arc of her invective presumably aimed at the little boy and girl ambling halfway down the block behind her

Answers Without Questions

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My father did not die before I was born. That much I can cite as not only fact but an absolute necessity to my existence. However, my father is dead. You can wrap as much sentiment and emotion around it as you wish, but you can't get away from the blunt…

Sequence Instead of Services on Sunday

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We reach for things and objects// made of ever smaller things and objects

Don't You Think

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a war forever seems so sadly stupid, pretty petty on our perky part in the ongoing play, a terrible loosed thing to have to always keep holding up our hostage hands to-- at least when being compared to…

This Is Not Your Poetry

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Your begging hands are hacking me up again like garden claws that know not the difference between a delicate solar powered flower and a tightening choke of killing weeds.It's not like it's even mine to keep-- like a legal document I'd…

The Choice

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The bull had flesh of a deep red that turned black where the massive muscles knotted. Colt thought of the way blood turns black when it pools too deep. There was nothing but muscle, an intricate network of coarse fibers woven tightly and wrapped in a thin

Someday

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He called himself Theodore Birdwhistle.

Lost

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I don’t know where I am. It is summertime, at dusk; the dying sun and the newborn moon are low on opposite horizons.

Soliloquies of the Interior Zombies

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My inner shape must be a ruin of organs,/ dead or dying. But do come close enough/ for me to hear. I need to know your story.

One Night Stand in Laguna Beach

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One time in Laguna Beach I remember sleeping with a girl I met at this café, the Jolly Roger, when we went back to my apartment and had unprotected sex. She said she was on the pill, but you never know. It was just that one time, and she did seem desperat

.38

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His name was Gino. I’ll leave out the last name, not that I think it matters anymore. He came into my dad’s gas station on the near North side of Chicago to have work done on his fancy car. I was still a teenager. I accidentally opened the glove compartme

Toys For Tots

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Every year at the orphanage, a new trend sprouted fully grown from a Sears Christmas catalog, and even though our belief in Santa Claus was dashed early on, we still loved the season because it meant a Paint by Number, Pogo stick, Hula Hoop or whatever…