Most read stories

Telling Maybelline Jones

22772277 views66 comments00 favs

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

Why I am Afraid of Spiders

22772277 views1515 comments1111 favs

SPIDERS

My Digital Garden

22772277 views77 comments44 favs

This part of her digital garden is not impressive, slightly sloppy, even haphazard. However, her avatar is an attractive woman with good make-up.

Joseph Campbell by the Aloe Vera Plants

22772277 views88 comments66 favs

There was man from antiquity that sat next to me. His belief in the healing qualities of Aloe Vera so pronounced, that the house brimmed with such. He had no use for modernity in any of its forms but was fond of supermarkets. When in one he was overwhelmed with an…

Being Old is No Place for Sissies

22762276 views88 comments66 favs

My natural blonde hair is no longer sultry. Instead of a Dietrich look, I now assume a dead on impression of Bette Davis in "What Ever Happened to Baby Jane" some mornings.

Rittenhouse Square: excert from Ari Figue's Cat

22762276 views00 comments00 favs

Trunks of plane trees with parchment bark, their shaggy pillars bear a canopy of green like a great tent spread over the square of the park. Cool misting lawn sprinklers, their umbral spay--brick walks glisten in the mottled light. Fading blooms of rhodo

Beautiful Plague

22752275 views77 comments11 fav

Jacob Obrecht, you are beautiful. Everything inside your head and everything you’ve ever made is beautiful and singing.

Rejection

22752275 views1212 comments1010 favs

I hate math. I hate everything about it.

writer’s block

22752275 views22 comments11 fav

round & round this empty block again & again i go

Out of That Bed 1963

22742274 views22 comments33 favs

My father's hands were huge. His left knuckles gashed as a kid when he rode his bike too close to a moving train. When his fingers fisted around a glass, the scarred joints bulged from his grip like blind eyes.

Earworm

22742274 views44 comments22 favs

It scraped at Paul’s brain like a cat’s claw at the door. He hadn’t heard the song in years. Was that the Searchers? The Seekers?

A Manual for Readers

22732273 views55 comments55 favs

The story will starve. It will crawl up your throat to get the cracker.

Accidental Faith

22732273 views22 comments00 favs

Until millennia have passed and the world is dug up For future historians to ponder And through their meticulous disassembling of dirt They will find my book.

I Draw a Map

22722272 views1212 comments77 favs

I draw your location on my thighs. It takes up both legs; it’s far. I think about showing you but something comes up. The phone rings. I tell her I don’t want to donate to the PBA.

Old Wounds

22722272 views2121 comments77 favs

We got married in a hospital. My bride had her appendix out the day before our wedding, so we decided to tie the knot in her room at Hoover Memorial.

To the prostitutes on Boracay

22722272 views22 comments00 favs

. . . not if I have anything to do with it.

1918, 1944, 1991, and now

22722272 views1212 comments66 favs

Disability is indivisibility—all of us could be its members—unlike its affirmative action forebears who remain underrepresented, even as the groups’ selected contestants prepare to retire early, a distributed group whose specialty is American anthropology

The Thirteenth Sign

22712271 views2222 comments1414 favs

I'm twelve again and

Sees, Kindness, and Made

22712271 views1212 comments1010 favs

SeesWe fell into this lake together and traced the clean soft lines straight back to ourselves, with a carefree laugh, ha ha ha-- an embarrassing ease. This small miracle does tend to put in orbit something high flying besides clouds into the sky inside of…

Alfalfa

22712271 views99 comments33 favs

The year I lick so much windowpane off stamps I have to use Elmer's glue to back the twenty-center for a postcard cash request to my mother, that I am alive note at the end of term, is the year of all the "wine" parties. "Wine" is what we put down

My Boogie Man

22712271 views99 comments55 favs

We'd both done well to avoid crying before today and I couldn't stand to see him like this. I crawled on my hands and knees to the closet. “David, come out of there. I…I don't like this any more than you do. But you can't come to college with me.

A June Defection

22702270 views2525 comments1515 favs

I came from the only flat region in the kingdom of mountains and fjords, and called the city “Down in the Dumps”. The beleaguering mountains smelled a flatlander when they saw one, and hated me right back.

No More Dogs

22702270 views2121 comments1616 favs

Highway 45N cost me four dogs when I was growing up. Actually, having our backyard abut the highway was the real problem. It got to be where I was afraid to get too attached. We lost Nicky,…

Pieces

22682268 views66 comments44 favs

I find my mother’s pink Pyrex mixing bowl at the antique store on Fairview Avenue. It’s in the hands of a fat woman in a blue down parka, and she’s holding it upside down, squinting at the sticker on the bottom.

nudes

22682268 views77 comments88 favs

for a handful of weeks/ my father took me to/ the college of art and design/ downtown/ where i took drawing lessons./

Something About Ireland (from FATHER MUST)

22682268 views44 comments33 favs

That’s the way it went all day with me—didn’t get far, didn’t see much, just, with Mary, drank tea here and there. A fine day it was, too; not cloudy, not raining...

Story

22682268 views99 comments55 favs

For two days, I bashed out words with grimacing fingers, wrenching images from my whining consciousness – a weak, lumbering, uninspired piece – and now for what?

How We Send to Anderbo

22682268 views1515 comments99 favs

She's always sitting in a soft chair watching television with little stars dotting her elbows and lightning bolts on her wrists.

Confess another sin

22672267 views1616 comments1313 favs

.

The Strongman Used To Weep

22672267 views1616 comments99 favs

The Strongman used to weep alone in hissingle dusty tent at night, all of uscould hear him, sobbing, thinking about theone incredible time in his mostlymiserable life he accidentallybrushed his thick arm…