Most read stories

Blue Jeans and Black Leather

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I lock the last of the beer and wine doors and head back to the cash register. Our clocks are not on bar time so I only have a few minutes. I check the till. A stack of ones and three fives. Enough to break a twenty, but looking bare. The parking lot's empty. The air…

Animus and Vitriol

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At some point, we will have to shoot them/ through the eyes and skull and heart

Danger Above, Danger Below

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And you know that notion just goes to show...

So You Want to Be a Poet

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You’re the girl that would sneak out to poetry readings instead of parties, watching fierce semi-bearded men reading their poems from hand-stapled zines.

Dinner at La Maison Bouche

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The knife that precedes the bigger knife that precedes the spoon that precedes the flat fork, with stuff like that I'm all butterfingers, & even though he's never been to Italy except once to shoot a gun when the world was a great big jumble, he remembers all…

Nothing in the World (an excerpt)

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All night the moon had watched him, and he’d been unable to return its stare. Finally there was sunlight, and Joško took up his rifle and rucksack. He had trouble keeping his balance at first, but gradually his legs steadied.

The Sugar-Free Scent of Today

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Should have washed our hands, we thought after, licking sugar-spit and dirt.

Black Coffee

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“I don’t see how anybody could do it.” “I could do it. I could do it because it ought to be done. When a thing needs doing, it’s best to go on and do it.”

The Color of Sound

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The girl put her elbows on the table and rested her chin in cupped hands and this was for comfort but she appeared symmetrical the way an etheric visitor might and the brightness was just then trying to find a way through an opening in morning dining room…

Arcana Magi Memorial Vol.2 - c.5

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Before Ciel could ask further, Sora pulled her arm. Ciel turned to the golem summoner and saw the look on her eyes, a silent warning not to push Azure.

Fiction with Teratoma Preserves

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In Nebraska, we found a dead man lying between the furrows of a field. He’d been there awhile in the heat and the sun, the only shade provided by a cloud of flies. The dead man lay on the ground, decaying, disappearing into the dirt:

They're cutting the catalpa tree (Catalpa speciosa) in Essen, Germany

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They cut the tall specious tree storms snapped the night in two or three. At times they pause most piously to count each ring of truth, drive nails into the stiff cathartic spine, divine if this unseasoned cigar topiary agrees with its own everlasting te

Drought

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burnt-up leaves rustle and fall

The Bottle

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That bottle just sits there in the closet, next to the hats and a box full of old gloves. Years it’s been there. Try as we might, we never open it. We just don’t have a damn thing to celebrate. Who was it brought that bottle into our lives and went and ruined …

On Writing about Velveeta

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You are fishing in a coffee cup. (Your fishing pole is a record player.)

Lule of Raw -2

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"The cops are just doing what they're being paid to do."

An Argonaut Ethos

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My daddy made all these gold records on the walls, died, and left me to run BadSmack Media, even if I could only manage to run it aground.

Go Yonder and Worship, part 1

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In the blue of the yard the twins boil and scrape, twisting about beneath the sycamore tree.

Coming Through the Rye

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As I stood in my mother’s closet with my niece Chloe, and read the letter aloud, I was shocked to discover I had shared with my mother details about my love life.

Albert Walks

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Albert Walks When Albert walks he is astonished. Ripe fruit falls to the ground at his feet, offering itself. The earth's tremor rumbles, celebratory, through his mended shoes and up his shins. The birds darting through the sky above …

Berto and Cosi

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Berto had come to live with me a month earlier. He’d been cursed by being the favored child of our parents. Their indulgence resulted in a 40 year old man and heroin addict from age 17 and all that accompanies such an existence such as thievery, larcen

Angels Carry the Sun excerpt: Chapter One, In the Woods

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Chapter One In the Woods Everett Finn liked white-bread sandwiches. In June, Flora forfeited all her free cafeteria lunches to sit with him during his quiet lunch breaks in the classroom. "Eleven more days until graduation," she told him. He sat…

I Happen To Think I Have A Great Face, Actually

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For those of you with a position cemented firmly to the contrary, I happen to think I have a great face, actually. My face, maybe I talk about my body a lot, but my face is pretty great, really it is.

"You Go"

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You like your life. Ducks march in a row. You've reached a certain age but you're strong. Healthy. You've got food, clothing, shelter. You have insurance and important papers. You don't have a man in your life, and you admit— Admit nothing. The…

SEPTEMBER GOLD or DAISY'S SONG

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We left Louisville two weeks after daddy died...

Some Kind of Compass

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if we stare into the dark long enough, we see ourselves at some end or beginning –

Telling Maybelline Jones

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Maybelline Jones is my sister, my friend, and I try to tell her the right way to be.

Miss Winter Solstice

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The palm trees bent upon her passing stride From fishnet stockings running up her hide;

Hands

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pressing my hands into the voice in the bed,

Demolition Derby

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ornery women / in tall hats, suspender dads, kids deformed with / ribbons