Most read stories

Epithelial Sample

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I found my black dot nucleus. School got me in the 10th year with the numbers spilling outta my head, but now I got the cell on my mind. Everybody's floating around this joint all pink and green college clean, yellow face Japanese, or the jet-headed Greeks with their…

The Loss of a Child

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I watched as the light fled from your eyes, No slowly dimming lamp,

Alluvion

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The Way Back Home

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500 miles all the way from Omaha nine hours on the back of a flatbed truck

The Clock Man's Trouble

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A lowing cow cracked open the darkened room like the yawn of a gravid alien.

Flying Tiger

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I screwed my courage to the sticking point and asked him if he had shot down any Japanese airplanes. He grinned at me. “One,” he said.

Good For The Ducks

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It's dawn. It's quiet on the pond in the Public Garden. The light is calm, the pollution is mild, and everything is still,except for the occasional cruising taxi. It's the beginning of spring-- tulips out, leaves…

Color Wheel

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I remember the tan guinea pig, dead of dehydration. Through the wire bars of her cage I viewed her body. She lay stiff on her side, stretched out, as if in her guinea-pig dream she had been running through grassland, open and close to the sky.

Hat Shop Girls

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My favorite was a red bowler, a man's hat, which I never dared wear outside my tiny bedroom. My three brothers wanted it too much to take that kind of a risk. They'd poke me with various sharp objects: the serrated edge of the bread knife, the rusted TV

The Serious Writer and His Penis

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Only strong personalities can endure such size, the weak ones are extinguished by it.

Tattooed Hands

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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.

Optical Delusion

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Veiled by tenuous clouds and dirty air,

To Live It Again

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She began guiding Penny’s arms, whispering movements through her body. Memory and experience sang through every fiber of their being. The song had become her life.

Bring Me His Head

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Just bring me his head, that cerebral kiln of hot, ruddy verbiage and cadence.

Woman

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When you move to the music of a woman

Out of the Loop

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Ed wants to watch the last half of the football game. His wife wants him to mow the lawn.

The Beat of Sorrow

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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.

Squirrel Boy, You Are My Toy

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unbury yourself from the silt and give me some seal love.

Blowing Up While Fading Out

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It calmed the guilt in my heart while kids reveled, laughed, and "made time" with the neighborhood girls on that final night of freedom. No one would talk to those girls again.

The Poem

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Riding in a pick-up-truck, the radio wailing some 'love em and leave em" country song,

The Field Guide: Olivetti

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When you last produced writing on a manual typewriter, was it before or after your first sexual experience, or maybe during? Manual or otherwise. Which do you recall with more enthusiasm...

Carrion Flower

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Jacabo gave the boy a can of beer with oxycontin and rat poison in it. He instructed the boy to drink and talk. Jacabo did this, fully aware that making ghosts was a costly enterprise.

The New Meow

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I'm delighted to report that I've come up with my own school of thought. It's called, "Dress Like a Cat Until You Get What You Want."

Without Consent

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You never thought you were capable of rape.

Red

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Erwin came into the kitchen through the back door and went straight to the sink to clean up. Black mud and dried blood crusted his fingertips and caked the callused whorls of his knuckles.  He used the round of strong-smelling soap he kept for…

hair

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A strange and unexpected shift has occurred.

Courage Under Fire

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Once upon a time, my friend and I met a nanny pushing a baby carriage and reading an e-book. She wore a plaid dress, blue stockings and a white barrette. A set of wrinkles marred her tanned brow. Multitasking seemed too hard on her. Inside the carriage

The MacGowans Flee West

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Some believe the Scots were encouraged to emigrate, hired guns as it were, to Ireland to civilize that population. If that's the case, we would see it as another evil English trick. In any case, we MacGowans are Scots Irish and Protestant.

Half a Lotus

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An Ayurvedic astrologer tells her that she is a child of India. Is a girl born in Indiana a mistake of just two letters on a Scrabble board?

Momo and Me

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Momo told me not to mind her, but I did. At night, after he'd tucked me in, I could hear him on the phone in the living room, talking for a long time. Early this morning he woke me up and gave me my backpack. ‘Put some clothes in here', he said. ‘We're going on a trip.'