Most read stories

“What will I do if I run out of stories,” she asked?

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You better not come home drunk, you shithead, or you'll be sleeping in the yard!

Alex Kraft and the Otherworld: Prologue through Chapter 27

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Prologue Late at night, an old man named Drevin Philpott stands on the deck of a cruise ship, looking out at the sea. The man is hunched and very small. His arms and legs are thin and he's got a bowling ball for a gut. He's standing on a chair so he can…

BEACH

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It's just me.An October afternoon.Ocean and Ocean and Ocean. if you keep looking, down the coastthere is fog.Only fog and me and sea.I imagine him before I see him.Slow walk just above the water line, the fog catching up behind him,fantastical cape.The rational…

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 Frogman

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http://www.punchnels.com/fiction/the-frogman/

I Found Myself in Waters

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Unready for the world, we pawned ourselves for a longer lease on youth.

The Pitch

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This is what I am saying now.

Denial

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Then for a few seconds, maybe even a minute or two, we wallow in a sensual shower of raw emotion. Our defenses are nonexistent and we are overwhelmed with care and gratitude. Suddenly, we love our enemies and are willing to forgive our trespassers.

The Straps and the Electric

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The winter sun was going down and she watched it out the window.Light like shards of glass,time had melted.It took hold.She was held down by brown leather straps and she couldremember the smell of incense and little hands and little eyesof an infant cold on the bed.She…

We're Pieces of God & We've Found Each Other

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The gates going up and down like gigantic windshield wipers to let the existent boxcars pass. We went across these real bumpy railroad tracks into a town so small there wasn’t enough room for the car, so we got out and went ahe

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.

(girls in their summer dresses)

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The life, the burning up that works up our loveliness, hot under the surface that is tempted to show forth its parts after being confined, enclosed, shut in. Beautiful honey-water sliding out of long bleak skies, after all the howling of our legendary you

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…

Trapping for Poetesses

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So many ingenious traps for catching and hamstringing female poets have been invented that it is a rare editor who ever really sees one. H.L. Mencken

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.

Lovely Gilded Scars

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Fugue State on the Waterway

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I am so lost in thought as I ride out of the woods that I forget which way I ought to turn, left or right; this can’t be good.

Post-Revolutionary Sports Boredom

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It isn’t easy being the #1 Jewish lesbian revolutionary bank robber in America–every Rebecca and Rachel who comes down the pike tries to knock you off.

The Garage

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My life accelerated by grime in my father’s garage.

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.

Short Blonde, Long Red

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Natalie blushed the vodka with an almost pointless twist of the fruit juice as I fought in my inside jacket pocket for my wallet...

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?

Cambridge Vignettes (from the 1960s)

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I wanted none of her. But also that day I had just finished The Story of 0., and my mind was full of sadistic whimsies and the mood of anythingness that the book instills: the pound of fleshness. Anyway, I sneered at her and told her she bored me, and sat

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."

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."

The Men on the Moon

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It was a gesture on their part, an act with meaning; they didn’t care about country or science; their love was their art, their art was their love.

Visitation

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Nothing but the motion

there was a shameful attempt to steal fire and now the vultures always come for my livers and my God I Am sorry

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The Divine and merciful Understanding Calls out to me But let me not speak its name. You are an unworthy hearer And I am a secret-keeper, cunning With keen thoughts and prayers of swift Justice Single is our thought and act And when we pray we know not what it…

Favorite Child

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It was in the early sixties when my mother discovered she was my father’s second wife. Four years before, they were married quickly, by a justice of the peace, because his transfer to the States had come through. He’d charmed her with his dark chocolate e

Puppet X, 5

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A man learns too late How small deer laugh It’s true When a man goes mad Ropes come down from the clouds He cannot be sure of anything Anything The way’s uncharmed He thinks someone else’s strange thoughts And it all seems a simple