Most read stories

the morality of pens: a sonnet

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poets can kill, or at least they once could:/ perhaps poems tamed us, if they are any good.

The Quiet Room by Doug Holder

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I keep my life very ordered. Order for me is security. I am sure of some things. Like the fact I work five nights a week, and sleep during the day.

It is Written

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That Dagwood is not a real person but a story told in dots. That Blondie is a male fantasy and will one day find her Nora Helmer.

By this Time of Year on Mars, the Flora is in Bloom

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Eyes so much deeper, that the internal flow could not hope to equal the intensity fired beyond iris, pupil and sclera. So blue, that life could not exist in the fragile shape of his heart, blue veins outlining an ever enlargening circumference…

If There is an Airport

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If there is an airport, it is one of dreams. If there is a dream, it is one of shadows. If there are shadows, there is not much more but the thoughts of a short man meeting a short woman on a runway of forbidden desires, in a foreign city belonging to n

Winter

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I first met death in an alley.

Hands of a City

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On the usefulness of hands.

Everyone Is Going Away

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“I don’t know what’s going on there,” Hank, who hated his name and wanted a more Biblical name because those names (Jeremiah! Matthew! David!)—although common—sound ominous, said as he pointed up to the top of the apartment building that housed the whores

When I Was Young In the Suburbs

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When I was young in the suburbs, there was an empty lot across from our house. Bulldozers cleared the trees, shredded the bushes, and piled mounds of dirt three times as tall as I. But they never built a house.The dirt mounds, chain-link fences, and neon signs were…

C O N F L A T E

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She jumped into the hole the other day. The hole that sucks little girls into the universe, and doesn't return them. I had to watch it. I had to watch her sitting on the dock. Lean over, and fall in. I couldn't have saved her. Nor God. Or Jesus. Not the bridge. …

A monkey puzzle rocket burst

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The things we do for books, she thought.

Strip (Her)

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There’s not enough cigarette cloud to conceal her, malnourished and pale beneath blue and pink lights that summon 80s-era skate rinks. She saunters towards the center of the stage, asking her bored expression to convey detachment, while a DJ that fits the

Notes on a Failed Town

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Very few photos of the bear remain.

Death Masking Love

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She brought the ends of her fingers to her mouth and moistened them in her warm saliva. The whorls of her prints glistened in the harsh light of the room, but it wasn't her own outlines she was interested in raising. His hand lay outstretched in his…

profanity

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@#$!

On West 4th Street

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Across from the Hell Hole the Cage on Sixth pulses, sweats, swooshes, hot concussion as players play for keeps.

Blues Machine

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Rockin' Joe Heath stumbled into the stairwell in nothing but a black Zildjian t-shirt, shushing himself, trying to see right, pounding head. He recalled the old lily pattern of the wall­paper and something about the tattered edges…

Godot Finally Shows!

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Vladimir and Estragon stood hunched at the corner of Ellis and Taylor in San Francisco's Tenderloin district. Bedraggled and spent, they looked dully around them at pretty much nothing. They could have been thirty, or maybe…

The Greatest Narcissist on Earth

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I forgot how masterful you are, way better than a pickpocket. After our meeting, I drove home with one hand. It felt funny but I figured I'd absentmindedly put the other in my purse or tossed it into the backseat with my jacket. In my…

Spring Ice

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...I stared at my good dog with the same entreaty I saw in her eyes. Save us. Please.

The Rest Nowhere

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A screaming comes across the brain

The Silence of Harold

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It's been sixteen days since I spoke with another soul. I don't mind much, but I know enough about people to know most would think I'm mighty odd. Muriel, for example. She'd be pissed as all get out. …

Morning

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Leaves dance their way down,unfazed by this September heat. Bus stop routines set already-summer ended years ago.A chipmunk scampers undera parked truck while once againthe young man does his morning…

Buoyancy

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When I ate with my girls, Bliss and Victoria, I would lift my head up and look at us eating until I could imagine him chiding me. “Our daughters are looking more and more like you each day,” he’d say. “Fat!” I didn’t feel like eating when I thought abo

Margaret’s Mermaid

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When she was eleven, Margaret still believed in mermaids. She would fasten the neon diving rings that her mother gave her to her ankles and swim around in the pool for hours. By the end of the afternoon, with chlorine-swollen skin she would wince as she…

The Colour of Love

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I carried him home, all blood and brains, and set him in the ground. Is that love, George?

Anti

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“What do you call this place?” I didn't really want to talk much in there. For some reason, talking felt too—linear. The words seemed to have a kind of reverberation into associations that seemed somewhat meaningless at the time.”

When Borders was Alive and Well

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I'd been working for two years as a barista in a Starbuck's in a giant, two-story Borders in an upscale mall on Rt. 355, a main artery between Washington D.C., and Frederick, Maryland. I'd finished my M.F.A in 2000 and was trying to build up steam for more grad…

Your Horoscope

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Sagittarius (Nov.22 – Dec. 21) Listen to the voices inside your head. They speak to you for a reason. Now is not the time for debate.

Derivative

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It’s not the money. The money’s/ just a way of keeping score.