Most read stories

The new year begins

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martyred young women lie in hospital beds

The Nude Pianist: A Novel: Chapter 29

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The funk of wet wool, stinky feet, reeking armpits, stale beer and fried food created a bohemian fetor.

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.

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

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

End of Wendell

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...though in reality it is a dirty white with brown splotches now appears to him as a fluorescent green garden snake.

And then we... Part 3

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Well, Bainz' dad didn't kill us for stealing his bomb because one of the drug addicts at my house was a cop. At least he said he was a cop, or knew a cop, or had something to do with the cops. I don't know for sure. I know he didn't look like a cop, at least he …

Blackballed

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When I was a small child, my father was just barely a man, and he was independently wealthy. So it didn't matter that he was an adolescent inside. There was never any mention of "working." No notion of career. Just the girl he knocked up and the amusing…

Josh and the Elder

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A cruel reminder of his irrelevance to the world of law, a world he had probably ruled for over 40 years.

At the back of the crowd

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They were all celebrating something, but she couldn’t see what it was.

Wonderland Or Bust

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Alice sat on the edge, her legs dangling in the void...

observations on an autumn day

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macho bucks in velvet defy you driving down the lane

Famous Female Artist

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My dog Alfie and I would get in my van and go out at midnight for a doughnut. Or an éclair. A French cruller, to be exact. Sometimes we would get Blondie's Pizza on Telegraph Avenue near the Berkeley campus, if it got to be too lonely and restless at nigh

Skins of my past

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The past follows, battered, bruised, always behind

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…

are you a life force?

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are you afraid sometimes, in the night, in the wind as it beats down your maelstrom thoughts?

Disparity

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These were strange realizations, and each built upon the one before until I was completely mystified and unsettled in my life.

From T.S. Eliot's Copybook

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Thanks for the invitation, although you don't make the Undergraduate Verse Society Ice Cream Social and Poetry Slam sound very appealing.

Heroes

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no one told him there was a place where heroes died, but he should have known it was in love

Ghostwriters!

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(Sung to the melody of "Ghostbusters")When your prose is weakMetaphors clichésWho you gonna callGhostwriters!Characters they speakNot much to sayWho you gonna callGhostwriters!I ain't ‘fraid of no rejectionI ain't ‘fraid of no rejectionLyin' in your bedImagination soarsWho…

white lights

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the little white lights i see mean many different things to me

The Poetry Section

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In the poetry section, no one talks except to say, "excuse me," or, "wow," or, "amazing," with the second 'a' stretched out like a blacktop highway. But mostly they say, "excuse me." and that's only because someone dressed in a corduroy jacket is …

Fall From Grace

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My usual angel fell from the ceiling and onto the couch.

light youth

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We entertained each other and stuck our fingers in each others’ cakes and pies and pulled them out licking them while looking at each other. I was light with youth in a white summer dress, swinging my shoe as it dangled off the tip of my toes, rubbing m

When Leaves Fall

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And then she'd wipe her eyes, sweep her hair between the crest of her left ear and the side of her face and press that ear to the knot.

When Do We Breathe?

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You deserve air.

Tuna Salad In Cat Heaven

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I ate a tuna salad sandwich for lunch.

Who Will Play Monica? That Is the Question

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It is absurd to think that a cockroach will wake up one day as a human. And it is certainly surreal to imagine that a fat pigeon in Paris, New York or Rome, say, or even Prague, will one day take up a pen and begin writing poetry, or wave the wand of phil

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.

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.