Most read stories

Runt Of the Litter

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I remember so many things … do you remember who I am yet? I attached pictures to jog your memory, including the house on Euclid where I lived. That’s my high school graduation photo. I was wearing my hair short that year, and blonde and natural,

Facing Budget Cuts, Schools Hire Samurai Crossing Guards

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“Out-of-work samurai have a choice,” says Bobby Ito. “They can terrorize local peasants at county fairs, or underbid low-skilled workers for menial jobs.”

Test

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We’re safe as houses/ and unmoved. We grow/ accustomed to the sound

Forgiveness

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Inside a restroom stall, Herbert Casey Jr. took a soggy roll of cash from his boot and placed a quarter of the wet bills into his wallet. He divided the rest into the three empty pockets of his blue jeans.

The poplar

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Sometimes we hurt ourselves, we scratch ourselves, we bleed — for a simple joy... All I wanted to do was to find the poplar again — the tree of my young arms, of my budding breasts. My fingers used to circle around its bold and vigorous waist, but in the…

Shine

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not sure why - we rise

The Gift

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There is no need to worry about art. Art in its ideal forms stays safe. Real art resists being the object of attention. It directs your gaze, and it swings in you forever.

Sometimes, It's Simply a Nice Dress

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Clarissa kept bringing up a particular subject in counseling. It seems two years before her affair, she had accused Jon of being attracted to her friend Steph. The evidence that led Clarissa to this conclusion, started at an office Christmas party. Steph reached…

Resist or don't

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I move, press my mouth to her ribs and trace a line between her breasts with one, sticky fingertip. She closes deep

update

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Last time I heard from you, you had been smoking crack with a hooker in the doorway of city hall

How the Other Half Lives

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Most of life, it turns out, is pathetic. Very little is funny. We have to generate our own laughter. Canned laughter may have to do. Even if we have to carry the can around our neck like a Saint Bernard or strapped to our hip

whose soul do you have?

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Whose soul do you have, now? (How many are you?) There are several around here running from death, laughing, whom you might know. I burned ahead, with life. I found my own haughtiness had little bearing on the unbraided thread of pleasure (when I wa

Holiday

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My guy was Croatian. I sought an Italian.

Hands

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the moment he started walking my hands were given new tasks to do:

POTATOES

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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…

Liberation, 2

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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

In Which My Girl Hits Me With Various Big-Ticket Appliances

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My girl hit me with an ice cream freezer. She did it ‘cause she said she didn't want me to tease her.

The Imbecilic Utterances (or Why is every man's burden the heaviest?)

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"Come into my face." said Duras famously as she neared death. This is very beautiful. If one takes Duras to speak of something akin to the 'face' as given us by Levinas, and we may display this face here as something like an Husserlian universal…

(melody) floating inside an f

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Like the miserable sledgehammer I am, with no adjective in place to praise your moon, you are a hole well-worn into my favorite rock. I have only been able to reinvent this wronged language, in which being moved by…

There Were Giants Upon the Earth in Those Times and the Wickedness of Men

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A pair of snakes contemplates gulping a pair of frogs.

In the Beginning...

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In the beginning there was salt. God licked the salt and said it was Good. Then there was light. And then chocolate.

lunch

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strange daysi'm having lunch with the babyand we're talking about people-watchingand old souls and coffee and twizzlersit's a weird conversation but she's my babyso something about some apple not falling far from the treewould best fit in herebut anywayi feel like i'm…

Thanks for the Unsolicited Advice

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And what is it I’m supposed to do With all this unsolicited advice?

passing in, passing out

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I hate turnstiles and revolving doors

The Invaders

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“Elaine, what's that bee doing?”, asked Jonathan as he slid his reading glasses down and turned his attention from the morning paper to a bee that had landed on the his Nesbitt's Lime soda bottle. The bottle sat on the small, hand-made table in their back…

One Night Stand Before Finals

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There was one girl from Ireland, with her thick Irish brogue, who came into my bedroom early on the morning before my final exam for my Master’s degree in the writing program at U.C Irvine. She knew I was so nervous about taking the exam that I hadn’t sle

Farm

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untilled, weedy, left to rest

truth be known

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It could be there is a little me, somewhere, truth be known. One time in Laguna Beach I slept with a girl I met at this café, the Jolly Roger, I think, when we went back to my apartment and had unprotected sex. She said she was on the pill, but you neve

3 Briefs

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Everything is on Time’s menu

Writing Poems

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We bring words together and set them up on blind dates. Watch them build a history together, get married and fight together. Make offspring syllables cradled warm in cribs of punctuation. Phonemes squeezed into existence by two parenthesis. Words…