Most read stories

William

22822282 views11 comment00 favs

The sun browbeat me relentlessly, like a one-eyed judge with an unforgiving heart.

Earworm

22822282 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?

Rittenhouse Square: excert from Ari Figue's Cat

22822282 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

The Sugar-Free Scent of Today

22812281 views99 comments77 favs

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

Joseph Campbell by the Aloe Vera Plants

22812281 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…

Pieces

22792279 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.

Beautiful Plague

22792279 views77 comments11 fav

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

Rejection

22792279 views1212 comments1010 favs

I hate math. I hate everything about it.

My Digital Garden

22792279 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.

The Thirteenth Sign

22782278 views2222 comments1414 favs

I'm twelve again and

Sees, Kindness, and Made

22782278 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…

Out of That Bed 1963

22782278 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.

Telling Maybelline Jones

22782278 views66 comments00 favs

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

My Boogie Man

22782278 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.

I Draw a Map

22772277 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

22772277 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.

writer’s block

22762276 views22 comments11 fav

round & round this empty block again & again i go

Accidental Faith

22762276 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.

A Manual for Readers

22752275 views55 comments55 favs

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

Carmen (from The New Yorker+ a Jimmy Breslin "afterword" from Newsday)

22742274 views00 comments00 favs

Every trip her mother leaves it until then: Shouldn’t she look for an apartment in a better area; shouldn’t she try for a job with some future? “And, you know, someday you could get married, Carmen.”

nudes

22742274 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./

Confess another sin

22732273 views1616 comments1313 favs

.

No More Dogs

22732273 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,…

Lunch at Lefty's

22732273 views1515 comments1313 favs

Sixteen years married, and now she wants a wedding ring. He brings her a box of Cracker Jack. She doesn’t think it is funny.

Alfalfa

22732273 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

To the prostitutes on Boracay

22732273 views22 comments00 favs

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

Noche de las Ranas

22722272 views33 comments33 favs

He pushed aside the netting and trained the flashlight on the dripping courtyard. Rivers ran off the wide pinanona leaves, surged through fissures in the crumbling wall.

A June Defection

22722272 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.

Of Cameramen and Death Squads in Tbilisi

22722272 views1313 comments1313 favs

we share somewhat the same past he was bureau chief of ABC overseas

With Ann Coulter on the Jewish Conversion Tour

22722272 views22 comments22 favs

A little bony for my tastes–I wonder if she’s on the Lady Di diet. I wouldn’t kick her out of bed for eating crackers, but it would be like sleeping with Eva Braun.