Most read stories

Zurich, 1989

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I do not yet really understand the power I seem to have at this moment. And I am certainly too young to recognize that it will end up being weakness, too.

A Frog in a Well

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Ikkyu liked coming over especially at dinner. I'm a great cook and even though he no longer needed to eat himself, the idea of a sumptuous meal and a nice bottle of wine appealed to him. We'd commune about the poetry of karma flowers, seafood, and women, he in his robes and…

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,

Unintended Consequences

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...you pile into your Mercury and barrel down the street, the air smells like sea, the night goes forever...

Necessary Heat

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What is writing, Rick B.? You appear in your photo to be more handsome than your first brother. Sudden memory appears: "Question mark? Curvy: cock. Exclamation! Stiff: prick."

Unseen (a Five-Pointed Star with Four Streaming Lights Coming Out of Its Back Like Mutable Feathers)

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What you see us doing here is not so much, andall we are not being there isn't either. Our kissing mouths may not always be singing, but we are constantly praying for you, and for more rain or less rain, rivers as the situation warrants. Don't…

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.

The Planet Will Be Fine without Us

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The planet will be fine without us as it was/ when the Permian extinction made the goo/ that made the Rockefellers wealthy.

Senior Center

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"Are you all right?" I ask. He blinks. He sits up. I help him stand. He looks sorrowfully at his coffee cup, which is on the floor.

Animal Park (Part I)

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“The robin is the one. …

Love

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Her letter ends with her best words: No one will ever love you like I do. Beneath, she draws a heart, sad eyes, two jewel tears. Yours forever, Dawn. Hole by hole, not to wake her sister, she pulls the paper free, creases, folds again, then cuts…

Rosaleen In Mourning

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She hardly twitches. Her face regards the stars. If her body is an object, it is the isthmus before global warming. They want to find the source of the glacier in her eyes that is always melting. Maybe they like a woman who cries.

I Am In Frequent Contact With You-Know-Who

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"I am in frequent contact with you know who, and am able, most of the time, to surreptitiously send messages all day long every day, whenever I am inspired."

Without A Trace

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There, at that cabin, she had first tasted the back of a hand in anger, the sting of a horsewhip, bone-deep fear and, finally, an unthinkable act of self defense.

The Unknown Substance

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Mama's good at finding things, but hardly ever what she's looking for.

Gerade rechts zum Volkszimmer

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So, we are all healthy but suffering financially, not equally so, and the tendency to suffer financially has been caused by humbling ourselves to particular men. We take a quiz in moral values, phrased as a party game.

The Grief Counselor

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At first she kept repeating "I don’t know why he's doing this" as if the cops thought she was mixed up in it somehow. When they convinced her that all she needed to do was talk to her brother and tell him to give himself up, she looked hopeless.

Yard Man

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It seemed there should be more tongue, so I started more, getting closer, and disguising my interest as being personable and caring about the yard triangle.

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...

Two Poems:With the Whole Crowd/Apparently So

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With the whole bizarre crowd surrounding us like birds on shit covered cliffs, offering up a bowl full of choppy seas to the many bored and stuffed sky gods, we danced our way into all their hard shell covered hearts as one thing. Still they never knew our hiding …

Why Dogs are Men and Cats are Women

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Dogs will hump anything. Cats do not hump.

Urban Renewal

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Bike shops, vintage shops, after hour bar shops

Raw Salt

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It was Gatlinburg in mid July

The Birds (2)

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The birds were stacked up in the branches of a pine tree behind the feeder. Several were sitting on the fence. “They’re massing,” she said.

The Way is Dark, the Road Long

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The day I got out of prison the sun was shining.

Karma, Old Dogs, and Fine Men

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“You people remember the thing you learned in science about every action creating its own equal and opposite reaction? The same is true in other realms. All of existence is continually recycled…again and again in infinite permutations. In other words,

Corvus

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Bracing himself against the wind, Zach gets to his feet without a thought for direction or destination. In the white forever of this place, there is no lantern to light the dark and bitter woods of memory. Even the croakers would find little use for such

Snapshots

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Jake remembers that Amy told him once that she thought that somehow he would always be a part of her life. That was before she went to Spain and married an American bull fighter.

Sam and the Planets

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No, she hated the vain, overweight, pathetic, glass-of-merlot-a-day, SUV piloting, Carmen-cell-phone-ring-toned, housewives and consumer sluts that charged through the store like starving hyenas through the fallen, decaying, putrid, corpses of a plague-ri

The Inkblot Test

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“Regard this inkblot,” the Psych says to Worker 168. “What do you see?” Worker 168, a thin young women wearing overalls, peers at the inkblot. “I see a beautiful summer day,” she says. “A young woman, wearing a flowing dress, sits…