Most read stories

Music and Books

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You're all I've got to keep me company, but it's a very fine company. So familiar, and warm as any cold digital fireplace. I can tell you've got more in your story, but it doesn't make you happy. I really do not feel well today. Fun I wanted to…

The Way it Ought to Be

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a rug burn tragedy.

strapped to the mast

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The light streaming out of the background of things, in the absence of memory. That’s what I’m talking about. Prepare to let out all your light from night until dawn, if you want to be in the middle of life. I never wanted to stay at the edges. It didn’

A Hundred Feet

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Why I roamed these flats, choir-Like floors of a century forgivenAnd wedded in an XXL gownIs beyond us. Give me something extra, please. This Town rides in like a school bus.

A Story from the Diamond

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A sweltering heat sits on the field like a fog failing to move. From the diamond, you were able to see the Chicago skyline poking above the apartment buildings like antennas, sending signals all throughout the world.

Quixote Bronson, Savior of Neglected Suburban Housewives

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Saturday night in the suburbs west of Boston. As Pancho Sanza and I drift wearily from one upscale restaurant to another, we see an endless parade of husbands whose indifference to their wives borders on cruelty.

AND I WILL REMAIN AS CAUTIOUS AS EVER

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We’re on the phone dead battery & I want this to last forever. The last thing I want to do is make decisions.

Getting There

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Her light blue eyes fixed on a point to our left, past one of the church steeples poking out of the flat, charred ground – like a toothpick protecting a birthday cake from its cellophane ceiling; an untouched bethesda keeping the never-blue sky from crash

Stumbling Grace

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I'm not sure if my heart is breaking Or attacking Like an aged lovesick romantic with a faulty beat, I sense a valve needs replacing But only after the main artery has been sutured and made whole By a seasoned and skilled Midwest surgeon in a…

On Reading Yeats' "In Memory of Major Robert Gregory"

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Two logs to make a fire burn, one real, one fake, for we have learned that's all an evening fire takes.

I fell in love with jackal face

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As we stood there, my hair slung over his shoulder like uncooked pizza dough, I updated my wish.

Discards

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Church-lady dresses with matching jackets

Tuna Casserole

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I remember when I pulled in the way the car door sounded When it yawned open. I think it may need some oil. In the dress you just bought, With one golden flip flop dangling from Your big toe -- The other under the bench, you told me. "We'll be having a …

Wonder as the Sum of All My Ignorance

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Questions unanswered proliferate/ across the April sky, blue// with wisps of cirrus white.

The words you are known by: To Mitt Romney on the eve of his national convention, a cento

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I'll tell you what, Rick, ten-thousand bucks? [But] let Detroit go bankrupt. I'm running for office for Pete's sake,

Still Single

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“Yes, Mother, of course I’m still single. No, I haven’t joined the Army. No, I’m not moving back home.”

Affair

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No clouds No rain

#1

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“I am the Successor of Peter!” he said, supporting himself on the shepherd’s staff topped with a crucifix: “And you are trespassing on Holy Ground.” Baal said: “No ground is Holy for me.

Marilyn, of NYC

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I remember another one night stand in NYC with a girl named Marilyn. We’d met up at Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference in Vermont. It was the Summer of Love, and a number of us student writers were planning a trip out to San Francisco to participate in that f

Sic Transit

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He was that famous actor—now famously forgotten—most renowned for his exits. He could burst through an in or out door with the best of them. Better than the best of them; he was the best of them. With the subtlety of his often noisy art he could…

On Strike in the City

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The first day of the Steamfitters and Pipewranglers Local 175 strike was exhilarating. Every man (accurate; there were no women in the union) showed his support outside the Willgarden High Rise Corporation's company headquarters on Fifth Avenue, shaking unreadable signs…

Five Million Yen: Chapter 31

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What do you Americans say, here is ze kicker?

The Abstracted Man

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The abstracted man lacks an inside. He is a body. A shell. An exterior that encompasses nothing.The abstracted man yearns to fill himself with adjectives. He lumbers through streets. No adjectives fit. He finds adjectives where we discard them. He carries them in his…

London Calling

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Bloomsbury crowd

A State of Affairs

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We could act the anthropologist.

Beauty Fell Through the Roof

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Yet tenderness resided here among the canvases, the tubes of paint, brushes, and candle wax; the splatters of discarded ideas. We made love the way people said prayers

Avoid Anything With an Ism

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Communism Capitalism Gism or Gysm, either way Avoid anything with an Ism Catholicism Botulism Socialism Skepticism If its got an Ism in it Avoid it, okay? (Advice for our newborn daughter) Avoidalism is okay Though So you c

The Generosity of Perishable Objects

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"As soon as you're born, they make you feel small."--John LennonI cannot do anything about how beautiful you are, my sour flower, but I can tell you this much: Joni Mitchell is better than all the cowards in the world. They all chose to somehow…

When I Met Sally

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When I met Sally I was all Unsuspecting Of what powers Might be found In this world and In a woman.

birdbrain

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feathered flightless freak of nature