Most read stories

Beaked

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night sounds

decades since minutes with moments to

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the drive-ins now are dead and gone / where once we laught through splatter films: / our screens too small, our horrors do not fit— / no monumental screens are left, / no close-ups show us what we think we fear.

Prairie Schooner

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The town is a wheel-less prairie schooner aground in a vast field of static

Three Things Not to Think About

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Wait until you are home alone at last. Put the dog outside. Close the cat in the room down the hall, where you can't hear her mew to be let out. Turn off the television. Switch off any devices playing music. Take the phone off the hook. Turn your cell ph

What They Heard

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There's nothing so new in the doing that it needs to be talked about in just spooky or secret ways, by you, me or anyone else tonight, but it might feel real good sometime and perfectly fine to hear…

Intermezzo

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Outside, Santa Claus has put on cat eye sunglasses and lights a cigarette.

The Guidance Counselor

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He’d see them for fifteen minutes at a time, juniors and seniors, all day long. On their way out of the little town he’d come back to.

The Guru

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He was journeying toward understanding of a higher truth so long lost.

Mamas Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Writers

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If you want a nice meal, writers take you to diners. They’re thinkin’ noirly, you want something finer.

Entering Massachusetts: Please Don't Hug the Republicans

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I omit the names not to protect the innocent--there aren't any--but because you've got better things to think about in the run-up to the Super Bowl, like does anybody ever pull Troy Polamalu's hair in a pile-up?

On Discerning That a Woman Had a Nose Job Before He Met Her

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The new nose-- I won’t ask how much it cost, but something’s been lost.

Pink Tights, Tu-Tus and Schmaltzy Music

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And then I get a call from a different kind of bar They say you’re drunk on Cosmos and actin’ quite bizarre.

The Pataphysical Tourist

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We all get in a carriage of tin and volcanic glass and go a-touring. We had quite an itinerary to fulfill, all of it loosely applied to the principle of serendipity. We toured Luxembourg and tossed pretzels to the bankers who did tricks for us, somersaults and complex…

Off The Cuff

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Sometimes words are carved in stone, but you won't find these in this poem

The Third Time my Father Tried to Kill Me

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They sang and clapped and stomped shod feet on hardwood floor, the smell of man sweat and bomb-making thick as perfume.

Go Ahead, Be the Opposite of Love

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"Living is easy with eyes closed/misunderstanding all you see.'--John Lennon That's an ache that's always inside me. How you'd rathertreat people as if they don't matteras much as some nice sounding words in a song. Their voicesas less than an annoying wind? Because…

The Sweet Need to Dream

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We all ache for the Purple storm that’s said to Smear its finger in the one True place our soul resides On the road to delicate love Rising in the summer blood And the raw shadows Behind lust make a woman Heave in the Garden While lis

Unintended Dispatch

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Other therapists had their own names for it: death by mishap, inadvertent fatal impact, unintended loss of life. These were all very polite ways of describing what happens when one person, mistakenly and without malice, kills another.

Bowling

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I had a dream about being in a vintage alley that had bowling balls with adjustable relations to gravity

McGrath & Company

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“I dipped a Camel cigarette in ink and smoked it,” he said. “When they took an X-ray, my lungs looked black."

Cosmicatholiconfession

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My sister walked in the room while I read Ginsberg / reciting the lines to Jaweh & Allah Battle to myself /sweating in the heat contour of my ugly body on the bed / the room the stench of rottenhumanasscracksemen

The Strangest Touch is Skin on Skin

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Whitman touched his share of skin and didn’t think of it as sin, and yet could bring himself to say “What is more or less than a touch?”

With Egypt in Crisis, Biden Seeks Access to Intelligence Briefings

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"The President feels that Joe's talents are best used elsewhere," said White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs. "We had a lot of take-out orders to keep straight with everybody working late."

verses versus verses versus verses

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poetry less than poverty: / fair warning to poets, but a good sign.

consolations from Cold Mountain

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not otherwise employed, writing verse,/ line by tenuous line the substance of pulse./ ―but no one collects unemployed verse:/ self-lacerations must yield blood, not ink.

What's Wrong with the World

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Everything's inflatable. Here we go. It's all plastic. Give it a rest, kid.You could say that I just want to enjoy nothing for now. But. Let's go ahead and buy into its precisely sealed with a rubber stamped kiss kind of survival rate statistic for…

The Here Here Here Lately

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electron metastasis

Gaze

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to think of him looking at me / for he to be I and I to be he / it is almost unbearable / to occupy two bodies at once—

Must've Done Something, Right?

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I hope you’re happy, she said. Fucker!

Once the Excrement Encounters the Oscillating Rotary Air Circulator

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The film canister—with Camembert's thumb in it—was positively gouging her thighs now. When would they give up for the day and leave?