Most read stories

A Traitor of the Better Kind

19111911 views1313 comments1313 favs

Go ahead, boy, pout like a fool.

Arturo + Lourdes, 2005 and 4ever

19101910 views44 comments22 favs

Here’s the story as compiled from the scantest of clues: The writing on the back of a stall door in the restroom of a twenty-four hour restaurant under the Gowanus Expressway.

~elephant ink~

19101910 views22 comments22 favs

one numberless character, an army of rants marching one by one, sand by sand, we move mountains this way…

Poetry is like baseball

19101910 views33 comments33 favs

Poetry is like baseball.

What the Dark Matter Says

19101910 views2121 comments1818 favs

There can be no convergence./ There is only the talking that talks about/ an angle of sight nothing else can share.

When I Became a White Girl

19101910 views66 comments00 favs

“Actually, children, none of us will be having birthdays this year,” my father sighed. “Not even me? Why?” asked Charlie. "Son, this is what's known as a ‘one-party democracy."

What We See

19101910 views22 comments00 favs

One day they will take what remains of my eyes so someone else can use them to see beauty, someone who will value them more than I have, someone who will be strong enough to keep them pointed away from ugly things.

AFTER

19101910 views1111 comments66 favs

You haven't lived until she dances just for you ..

Peripheral Anthropomorphism and the Fall of Troy

19091909 views11 comment00 favs

For Hector it was animals. Rats, dogs, fish, and quite often horses – sometimes even lions. But for Achilles, it was always dead bodies.

forever

19091909 views2020 comments1515 favs

over tea & saltineshe read melike an obituary

The Common Cold

19091909 views3333 comments1313 favs

There was dad sitting at the table, wide awake, reading glasses on nose, pen in hand above a Doppler graph of numbers on paper, one of many now-lost theorems, looking up as his son walked into the room.

Bus

19091909 views55 comments44 favs

You can’t take a chandelier on an emergency dash across a nuclear desert.

TRANSLITERALIZATION

19091909 views55 comments22 favs

The snapdragon has now achieved absolute resonance, the gateways on either side are fully opened wide with beautiful iridescent curtains billowing out in high frequency spectrum waves producing a very pleasant ecstatic effect within observer's sensory app

The Great San Francisco Poetry Wars, 1

19091909 views22 comments22 favs

In those days everyone ate poetry for lunch. It was considered essential for your good up-bringing and mental health. We would skip a meal in order to satisfy our hunger for words. To hell with a meal. To hell with dirty politics and meaningless wars on o

Love Story

19091909 views66 comments22 favs

You longed to rip off her butterfly wings and watch her scream in agony. You ached to carve the steel from her eyes.

The Stick

19091909 views44 comments22 favs

When you finally got blood from the hard stick You spotted the backflash of red And said Thank God. The woman’s legs and arms Were everywhere, and you were in the middle Holding her down with one hand while wielding A butterfly in the other. You stuc

dinner for one

19091909 views88 comments66 favs

no one else comes in my back door but you

Hemingway for Gloria

19091909 views1616 comments88 favs

He disliked intrusion and very specifically innocuous intrusion, nice guys, one might say, who tried to be near him to learn something from him or who admired him but who, as in that passage, came merely to disturb his work.

Rule Out Euthymia

19081908 views2626 comments1212 favs

In her belief that Juni is lucky, Jade eases the horrors our mother suffers at night, not because Juni is stuck in a physical passion, but because the whole family and whole groups of strangers know what Juni is doing for sex.

Grand Fury

19081908 views66 comments11 fav

At some point, Spiro thinks, everyone must look like a sniper.

Honor Grade

19081908 views3030 comments1717 favs

It was a surprise they put me in a dormitory, not a cell,

Tattooed Hands

19081908 views11 comment11 fav

A 1960’s of walking sugar beet fields to remove the rogue bolters by hand and on other days painting the ironwork of cattle sheds with red oxide. Then a 1970’s when the self-inking explosion of tattoos on his hands and then his body began.

Snuggie your Life Away

19081908 views77 comments00 favs

Who is the moron that invented the Snuggie?

The Beat of Sorrow

19071907 views00 comments00 favs

See a girl like Lily sitting offstage in a wooden chair in a fourth-rate club somewhere, crying, holding on so hard to so little, and as it breaks your heart to watch; forgive me. Understand me. You can’t rescue us. We all deserve more.

Ingrid Bergman Answers the Call

19071907 views33 comments44 favs

Out the window is an empty birdbath, dry flaky concrete ring, no birds.

ALL THE BASTARDS AND ME

19071907 views55 comments44 favs

The apartment was a second-level place, so I went down the steps and looked through the stained glass window of the door. “Ah hell,” I said to myself. Raymond Carver and John Fante and Charles Bukowski were outside. I opened the door.

Tales from the Golden Age II

19061906 views1313 comments44 favs

--How's the wriiting business? How about that thing you' was workin' on..."Gawain's Green Nights?" --Yeah, well, I'm kind of off the soft-core...

A Hole In The Bucket

19061906 views77 comments11 fav

In 1978, a computer program became privy to my grandmother's most secret thoughts.

Laundry List

19061906 views1616 comments1515 favs

• Don’t confuse the virtues of bananas with the virtues of banana bread

a microcosm

19051905 views1212 comments55 favs

The right is empty, waiting to receive the load like a catcher behind home plate.