Most read stories

Beautiful Plague

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

Veld fire

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The crackling inferno sweeps across the ground Devouring all in its scorching path

Why I am Afraid of Spiders

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SPIDERS

nudes

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

Rittenhouse Square: excert from Ari Figue's Cat

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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

Frank Meets Francine

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I interviewed in an hour and didn’t have an umbrella, so I ducked inside the next door I passed. It didn’t matter what they sold, I wasn’t there to make a purchase.

To the prostitutes on Boracay

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

Earworm

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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?

Accidental Faith

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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.

Story

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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?

Confess another sin

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Ditching the Universe for Katy

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I am running for only one thing now. For Katy.

The End of the World

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I find driftwood, long, smooth logs washed up on the beach, drag them to dunes still wet from the sea...

A Good Boy

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...I had a string of Sunday School medals that knighted me a warrior for Jesus Christ of Nazareth...

Pieces

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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.

Being Old is No Place for Sissies

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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.

How We Send to Anderbo

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

Frozen Chicken

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One of the pieces, I noticed, had the real shape of a miniature chicken, its mohawk, pin legs, and small definition of wing. “Look at that,” I said to my friend. And just then, the wing twitched.

Out of That Bed 1963

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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.

Kitty Love

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Our next door neighbor is in love with his cat. His wife sits in our kitchen crying her eyes out.

My Boogie Man

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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.

We Don't Need No Education

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“There’s an ill energy that emanates from your precise heart that I find attractive”

No More Dogs

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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

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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.

Whatever Happened to Sue Ellen?

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When she awoke in her yard, she poured what was left of the rum into the dead grass. The man beside her lay with fingers curled, a claw she’d found wedged up her skirt when she woke. Tom, she said, his name nonsense, tongues. Might as well have been any

Swimming Pool

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My glasses fog up every time I go to collect her from the pool. I'll never get used to glasses. When my sight got suddenly worse the day she was born, I didn't tell anyone. As she turned from baby to child, my love for her grew, and my world got smaller,

Threesome

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Six kinds of crazy, he said. That told me everything. It told me enough.

Velcro Shoes, a Cardboard Computer, and Other Signs of Brilliance

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It wasn't until later that I realized that any time a teacher complimented you on your use of imagination, it was because they didn't know what else to make of whatever you'd created. My homemade narrative video in lieu of the assigned “getting to know y

The Five Stages of Editing

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The recent release of my debut novel alt.punk was extraordinarily exciting; however, maturing the novel from first draft to publication was not without editing pains. Similar to the Kübler-Ross theory, I progressed through what I refer to as the “five sta

Third Time's the Charm

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No jobs except drinking...