Most read stories

Tough Guy

10861086 views99 comments77 favs

He remembers his father’s concrete slab hands. Balled into fists they resembled kettlebells.

79 AD

10861086 views77 comments55 favs

No CNN to sing obliteration,/ only Pliny the Younger/ to scratch what fell

Liberation, 2

10861086 views00 comments00 favs

It was Phil Collins on MTV, “In the Air Tonight,” that helped cement it for me. It was the beginning of the end of my marriage. Well, not exactly the true beginning of the end. You would have to go pretty far back, honestly, to find the true root of it

At your service

10861086 views11 comment11 fav

A horn blared behind him. Dan put his Corrola into drive, and began inching forward. Something colorful passed on his left and abruptly pulled in front of him. He slammed the brakes, nearly ramming into a bubblegum pink three-wheeled motorcycle command

How Lost Can We Get?

10861086 views33 comments22 favs

“Your family, that family is crazy, everyone of them hush hush, tweet tweet, a little screw loose – or a bird, what kind of bird they got there?”

My Composite Girlfriend

10851085 views00 comments11 fav

Her dad regaled me with stories of his up-from-the-bootstraps climb out of poverty on the hard-scrabble, rough-and-tumble Lower East Side of New York, where he founded the leading supplier of hyphens to writers of purple prose.

Israel's Pig

10851085 views00 comments00 favs

“Isril, I won't lose dis child tuh hunger,” Mina said as she rocked her young son to sleep. Noah sat on her lap, head on her chest, and exhaled a plaintive moan that grew softer and softer with…

That Painted Up Whore

10851085 views44 comments66 favs

Some things stay with you. I got off the bus, petted my dog, Nick and walked in our house and saw Mother at the kitchen table, crying and clearly angry. I asked her if she was sick. She works. She said that she didn't go to work today and might not go tomorrow…

The Silent Service

10851085 views00 comments00 favs

Anxiety masked.

Still

10841084 views33 comments00 favs

I wanted only to be still, to become a rustle for a moment of papery fall leaves sighing past one another on their way to the funeral pyre in the front lawn, sweetly fragrant with the scent of death and inevitable decline, fearless in their annihilation, incandescent…

it’s possible that i’ve given this some thought

10841084 views00 comments00 favs

“Our legs are touching. Our legs. Touching. The light from the screen illuminates your eyes. Off and on. Even in night scenes. Maybe it dances in the eyes of other people there too. But I doubt it. Not like…

Wait room

10841084 views44 comments22 favs

It was Saturday morning."The coffee maker is not ready yet," said one of the old men. Like the present company, his form was swollen with mismatched layers of cold weather wear.It was a white room with a dozen men, three couches, and a large screen television flickering…

Basic Principles of Physical Space

10841084 views66 comments44 favs

a body lost in thought stays hopelessly lost in thought for as long as the latte lasts and the coffee shop stays open and the moms don’t gather with their baby carriages and the bums don’t bum overly much and the trust funders don’t lose too

New Year's Resolution

10841084 views22 comments00 favs

“Hey, come on and sit down,” Jake motioned to her. It was three in the morning and after way too many gins the last thing Melisa wanted to do on New Year’s Eve was to chat with her ex-boyfriend. In fact if she had known he was goin

Here I Am

10841084 views00 comments00 favs

The paper in his typewriter

White Treasure

10841084 views11 comment11 fav

one man's trash

Bukowski in Hollywood and the Collating Party at his Apartment

10841084 views22 comments11 fav

They called him Hank. We piled in a car and drove up from Irvine to his little bungalow apartment on DeLongpre near Hollywood Blvd. for a collating party for this Mag he started with Neely called “Laugh Literary and Man the Humping Guns.” No shit, that wa

On Perfect Marble

10841084 views44 comments44 favs

So the subtle shadow settles onto perfect marble on the floor of the ocean when the sunlight blooms over space and time but only in the near future as it has always been

Burn

10841084 views99 comments77 favs

No one believed me when I told them this: I took all of my novels and tossed them into the fire.

Moreneta

10841084 views00 comments00 favs

Hold my heart the child in your arms The roses of April blooming, I bend down before you cracked and broke Spilled out like albumin.

Villon, Stop Following Me Around!

10841084 views66 comments55 favs

Villon, get the hell outta here!

A Matter Of Convenience

10841084 views00 comments00 favs

Every retailer within my five mile containment zone is consumed with my convenience. It is incredibly comforting, this suburban fixation with access, proximity, speed, and ubiquity. If Marx were hanging out in American subdivisions today, he would likely

Enè Ioh

10831083 views00 comments00 favs

Hello, I am Enè Ioh, I have come to to tell you a story that takes place within the place. I start at the place; I go to the place. Here we are, at the place. I am now at the place. I know what I say is of no consequence and I will be killed for it. It means so…

The Longer

10831083 views22 comments00 favs

The longer this goes on the worse it gets.

Until, the Stars

10831083 views00 comments00 favs

Until the stars form last nightI zoom out with an empty heart.Whose forgiveness forgesseas of overabundance, parksUnder the river's bed as magazine?Jet heavy, my tenses shift in an operation between two frightened doctors. I'm hiding onside: the lines & in the branches…

Flight

10831083 views11 comment00 favs

They’re friends, him and Sissy and Raul, you know, and live upstairs from Asa and he went up there. He kept texting me saying, B here all night, follow u 2 airport. Yelled down through the floor. Real crazy shit.

Parables for Rodin

10831083 views66 comments22 favs

His beard is an eighteenth-century forest / in south central France

POTATOES

10831083 views00 comments00 favs

The hospital was a welcome relief. A short ambulance ride, a nice man holding your arm in a make-shift tourniquet, the red sirens flashing and screeching. Then you were…

Love Makes the Boundaries Disappear

10831083 views22 comments11 fav

She was asked: “What would it mean to be in a great earthquake to you?” She said: “It would mean that I might never see him again.” Then she panicked. She came to me and said: “Do you mind riding in the other car? I have to ride in the same car wi

The Great Dying, Pt. 2

10831083 views00 comments00 favs

"Great! Great. I got your message . . . yeah, it’s a little long. It’s 140 *words*, not characters . . . "