Most read stories

The Anguish of Easter

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I used to be so certain about right and wrong. About choices and their consequences. About heaven and hell and how there was no room in between no space in between no point in between (take that point how you will)

Taking steps to ascendancy

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... in view of her sixteen-year-old step-daughter’s barely-concealed hostility, she held her tongue, as she had done for the past ten days.

Barbed Wire

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The end of love is a rusty barbed-wire fence.

No. 6 Kleingemainergasse

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As it was, she was on a mission to get back and either close the chapter or re- open it on her former lover. Something was curiously drawing her to him. She was frank with the man on the plane. He understood. When they deplaned on the tarmack in a snowsto

Reconciliation

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Deciding what is important from the life of a man that you haven't spoken to in ten years was a task that had seemed impossible at the outset. But now, here she stood, having done just that.

The Enabler

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I still see you lying on the tracks

The Time of His Death

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…if something happened to you so horrible that you no longer felt like living, would it have been better if you had died at birth? Okay, that's probably too early. No reason to act in haste. Maybe you should die when you're eighteen years old, just before…

To Fill the Hollows

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most famously, a small/ writhing dog. A thousand casts were made/ before they stopped

Main Street

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You know when you see the flashing blue lights in your rearview mirror that you're not being pulled over because of a busted taillight or carelessly doing fifty in a thirty-five mile an hour school zone; your crime is being a Black man behind the wheel. It happens often…

Winter-Love in a Dark Corner

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. . . making a little winter-love, in a dark corner.

Botanical Maneuvers

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They hunger for new real estate/ and those resources underground

Found - Guano

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Snail ooze and bull semen

of love and death

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- I wish I were taller. - You also wish I never die.- What´s your point?- Santa Claus must really hate you.------ What´s the most ridiculous thing someone´s ever asked you?- Please never die. - But you promised!------ I just want to go to sleep, I´m…

women in labor

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I am like a spice in wind, warm and gentle on the face, a reminder of your youth, tried and true. Lick the trapped silk from my soul, is all I am saying, with your high language. Get the core out of me and turn it under your tongue. Why shouldn't the egg

Jim

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Jim twisted the skinny trunk of his body in a fast, violent jerk just as the cop grabbed the buckle of his left Harley Davidson boot. When the boot flopped off, Jim found himself sitting upright, ready to jump up and run. But then he felt the baton lock down on his…

With Torture Banned, US Tries High School Awards Night

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“He’s a tough nut,” says CIA officer Marlon McGrath. “He says he’ll die a martyr rather than crack before we get to the Booster Club award for outstanding female athlete.”

Late Night Phone Call

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When the phone rings that late at night, it’s not good.

Love in Miniature

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Hole #1 – Loop-de-Loop A piece of metal curved into a loop like a curlicue off-ramp. Jake and I step up to the Golf-O-Rama mat like accidental twins. My ball is half blue and half orange, like a gas station freebie. The old man at the desk said I

Testament Part 2 of 6

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One must learn to give the Bull the things/ it needs: space, grass and grain, his mates/ and offspring, and elude the things/ its momentary fury wants- your death

More Corpses

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(I would cite here “corpse plumbers”, but I fear being misconstrued.)

karmic youth

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We were so easy, so willing to be drained, that to start making those puffed-up stories about us now, our courage, etc. would be purely misleading. Put a bottle, or glass of wine in our hand, and our panties flew off, and gladly we would have followed y

Return

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We head home, skirting along the coast, humble before catapulting waves; the lighthouse near invisible if not for a single band of red.

Driving in Jeddah

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In suburban Jeddah magnificent houses on every corner of the avenues are surrounded by high walls rising up from just inside the roadside curb to much beyond taller than a man.

The sound of your shoes

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The smell of your chest, and the taste of your lips as they touch mine

That Old-Time Religion

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The road to heaven is littered for miles with dead sinners, or more precisely, the sides of the roads are lined with crosses on which the sinners are nailed. It has always been so, since time started ticking for Civilized…

Five Million Yen: Chapter 42

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We had sex, but hadn’t established a strong relationship. We liked each other as more than friends, but I was worried that Claudia was acting as a honey trap and spying on me for Dan Arris.

My Space

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Hey, can you move over and let me sit down here? In German you would use Raum to mean room, or for an area, a region or something like that. There is another word for “room,” as in a room in a house, but you can't use either of those words to ask someone

The Prom Queen and the Quarterback

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Friday night, a bar downtown, beneath the swirling dots of disco lights, seated at a table by the door, I come across a Cheerleader from my high school days, having a Martini with the Quarterback she married. Even in forgiving light, …

Biblos Melas

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While laying in his hospital bed recovering from a minor heart attack, Professor Martin Hellman reads details of an ancient book he has been given for translation--Biblos Melas, or, the "Black Book." Excerpted from the forthcoming novel "Minion Web."

The Magic of the Old Man

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As far as I knew it was just an old man and his wife who lived in this house, but not really. I mean if you had seen what every person on that block had, you would have realized that many lived there, well many beings.