Most read stories

The Sham Wedding

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Mary Jo told me to hire somebody to marry us in a ceremony in the living room up at the house on Fairlawn. This was to take place in two days. Her divorce was final, and she had to get married or else it was all over for her child custody. I guess I was

My Composite Girlfriend

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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.

justice in obverse and reverse

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seriously: let defendants choose their coin, / execute their own calls, make their own coin flips― / attentive referee, no need for a court.

I Said God Damn

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the space between two antelopes is a canyon,

Poem for January 1st, Feast of Christ's Circumcision

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Who has the child’s foreskin The mohel has removed? Who took the bleeding piece of flesh His human nature proved?

The Belonging

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I don't belong. I don't feel privy to grown up conversations, yet I can't relate to teenage expectations. I'm floating on the walkways in another dimension of time. Everybody looks like ghosts functioning in robotic ways. I feel an electric eye following me in my…

The Sun is Here

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and I revel in the fact. There are other facts at work and play, but I'm hanging out with this one because it is my day off and I'm listening to music and writing poems. I like the bright appearance coming from the bedroom…

Broward County Love Song (flaxen from the sun)

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If the little buildings had hair the hair was as if sleeked back some and also flaxen from the sun. Men walked past there and of course women also all in the requisite wear of the world. We dashed felt pens on curb-sides writing our names in the world and way in behind…

The Year of the Horse

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“She's the year of the horse,” Metri said as he peeled his dirty head from the bed, his hair was as matted as a racoon tale. It was as wild as a wild animal and smelled like body odor with a hint of blood. He slid his scabbed hands up to his chest as if to…

Downtown

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From the parking lot to the stadiumdown town waiting for the crossinglightthere are a few others in jerseys but not manywe are too early for that.Desert gravel crunching scuffle of canvas shoeskicking granitehop along wobble steps and I turn to seewho's off the…

The Lady and the Boy

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The aftermath of a lady's adultery.

The Joint is Out of Time: A Journal of the Plague Year, Day 108

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History in the unmaking.

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…

Thanks for the Unsolicited Advice

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

The lady makes a phone call.

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Of course it’s because she’s been drinking. Will she regret this? I don’t understand it but maybe it is something she has thought about for some time.

the return of Ulysses

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Then you came home from your travels and stole her, your new queen, though she was ready. And raped my heart as you entered the new passage to heaven. And I cried out your name on the river, and swam in the warm waters behind you, naming your new name a

Paper Thin

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She slipspaper thinshe ripspaper thin

Basic Principles of Physical Space

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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

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

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.

Chills On My Opposite Hip

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You gave me chills on my opposite hip whenever you touched me from behind, when we spooned under the rough woolen blanket in your basement. Whenever your essence touched my life like that. Just like when you said, “You came, that’s all.” That’s all? T

Coins

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I was reading The Transmission of Doubt by Adi Da, and since it was just shy of five hundred pages, I had become tired and needed air. It was funny because Eglington Square Mall had only one floor and was more like a mini mall than anything, with a beer store on…

Duet

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Love is music timed in heartbeat move to rhythms ages old

Slightly Broken Sonnet

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It's late it's early love youfuck me the difference isin the garage boxes sitbehind me in the trunklike passengers beside melike pedestrians in frontof me I choose our directionwhat stays what comes whatis what and how did I end upin the garage in the first placein the…

They Know Better.

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Fat Yasmin and Greg Lane were quite a couple. They held hands a lot. She was a mound of shit. “She had to go…

Peeping to See if Spring has Sprung

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as if someone had spilled a bag of perfect diamonds on the world.

holy the valley

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Apparently we must endure them forever, the gods. My willingness to live among them, and love, with their high-pitched voices. To endure or be endured equally, each one of the Fates, each one of the high hearers stammering out the certainty of their lov

Nothing Beside Remains

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It was the early 80's My students carried / guns.

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

I will miss you

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I will miss you, sure, let it be known. The memory, and the dream, both. That familiar smell of Old Spice when someone wearing it comes near. And the smell of Coppertone Suntan Lotion on the beaches of our youth in Chicago. And the pressure of your fing