Most recent stories

take

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THERE'D been mutterings on the shareholders' board about a dodgy deal shoved through. In the rush after the towers' thing to get out relevant stock an executive producer had signed off on some film school kid for five big ones to shoot a…

As a Film Cassette Enters a Camera

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"...only images I can know,"

Slight of Hand

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Our ironies don’t make us happy

Bums of the Bird World

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Yeah, okay, so pigeons are the bums of the bird world So what are a flock of crows working over a wheat field while the artist Vincent is desperately trying to live with his bleeding ear or to sell at least one painting during

B.U.N.N.I.

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Then I see her walking down the grass aisle: my assignment. She looks nothing like the image I have been trained with, but her identifier is strong.

Hot Rocks

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We go to the spa on my wife’s day off and get a manipedi. A swarm of little women pounces and works on our fingers and toes.

1918, 1944, 1991, and now

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Disability is indivisibility—all of us could be its members—unlike its affirmative action forebears who remain underrepresented, even as the groups’ selected contestants prepare to retire early, a distributed group whose specialty is American anthropology

Startle Reflex

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I’m decades in and it hasn’t gone away. In all other respects, I am normal. Life is hard, but I’m not complaining. The thing is, I am in a constant state of falling.

Carmen Rental

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But in 1991 Carmen developed a heroin habit and was forced to sell her powder blue, convertible Mercedes 500SL...

Hip-Hop Elephants of the Golden Palace

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Hello floaty word man / suspended in smoke / chortling coughing with collapsing colon / spraying sounds into the day / making it night and ending the line

John Ruskin doing a Swan Dive

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She used her right breast. Lifted it to her chin, aimed at the can, and shoved it down as hard as she could.

My Bunny Hop Years

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The Bunny Hop represented that riot-like atmosphere–in cuddly guise–described by Claude Levi-Strauss in his seminal essay that I have forgotten the name of it’s so important.

Scottish Independence

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with peaty aromatics, opened,/ and a welcomed sting, swallowed,

It is Easier Than You Think To Ride A Train: The Q & A

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Q:What made you want to be a person who rides a train? A:As soon as I learned there was such a thing, I wanted to be one.

The Opposite of Fear

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The rocks were pillows around her shorn head, the crimson stream running from her ears the only sign she had not chosen to lay down on them. Behind us, the rockface stood stoic; below us, the water lapped our feet.She held my hand in hers, giving me succor as I…

Decided

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Millicent asked me to stop over at her place for coffee after work because we needed to talk. While pouring, she said she was torn about telling me what her father used to do to her when her mom was not around, but she thought I needed to know how twisted her life was…

Mick Dever

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The P-36 used for gunnery exercises was twitchy and stubborn...

Ten Books That Have Stuck with Me Off the Top of My Head as I Make Them Up, #2

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#2 The Typewriter Inside You by Harmon Gentle—I found this one at a garage sale when I was 15. Intended as a manual for sharpening one's typing skills, by the third chapter it became obvious that Mr. Gentle's sanity had slipped, and that rather than mastering the…

some poetry will shut you up

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o christ/ here you are again/ you sickness appearing in my brain/ pouring smog from my jaw/ my body hot and cold as though sleepless/ while i could sleep/ centuries/ undisturbed/ and awaken, tireder still./

Polite Grafitti

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He was entirely guilty of what he had done and wanted that to be acknowledged and understood by the arresting officer.

On Perfect Marble

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So the subtle shadow settles onto perfect marble on the floor of the ocean when the sunlight blooms over space and time but only in the near future as it has always been

Landmarks

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Play somethin’ solemn, they told me, or somethin’ that sounds like home or the mountains in summer.

Raw Meat

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I took Annie to the zoo, and the tigers got out. The little tigers, that is. Cubs.

I'm Dreaming of a Nihilistic Christmas

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The mind sparkles with Shakespeare. It's like hearing the rain fall. The world becomes silent and dark and the rain becomes snow and falls like snow and rests on the ground like snow and informs the mind with the values of heaven. A distant oboe pins its sympathies…

Food Porn

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Thin slices of ruby tomato, red onion, and green peppers joined the bacchanal, wilting in the bliss of chile and cilantro raining down on them.

Pop Tarts

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The currents of events/ strip the molecules from cartilage,// reverse polarity of ventricles—

Goodbye

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In the end, he knew he wasn’t going home.

Breakfast in Prague on 9/11

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I was sitting in Prague having breakfast on 9/11 near the Astronomical Clock while the world was bombing ISIS the sons of ex-Nazis sitting at a table nearby and old apparatchiks leisurely eating sausages while the world took a moment to

The Box

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It was just after lunch when they found the box.

9/11

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He laughs and runs just like the other boys even though he doesn’t have a father now, just his mom.