Most recent stories

tiny thoughts

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what if I die?

Patterns

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He stood with his cardboard sign and watched the faceless occupants, watched for a car window to lower; there were few.

Nightbound

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Intimacy is safer in the dark.

Music

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Without a creator

Bruegel days, nights by Bosch

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no matter where we sit or how we stare— / all parades now march away to one day.

I Waited Too Long to Remember

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We're in a sedate forest next to a boisterous beach. The sky is sea green above the trees and forest green above Sinepuxent Bay. Chaste squirrels are keeping a lookout for bad-boy gulls. Kids on circus bikes ride out of the woods into their bathing suits. The…

Notes from a Quarantine

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EnzymesI enjoy learning about enzymes. In the human body, they're catalysts. They interfere, breaking substances down so they may be sent on their way to accomplish a task. Imagine a cluster of construction workers; shit-talking, cat-calling dames, engaging in mildly (or…

Shameful Maneuvers

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Most of the boys I pretended to marry thought my classroom seductions were funny, but there is a chance that one of the boys turned violent against me.

The Street Singer

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The Street singer gathers up his coins and counts to a hundred before The last string stops vibrating

I Still Miss the Sun

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I know I’m in the sky all night And can lie back and sometimes have some fun But these stars around me aren’t everything in life I still miss the sun After your first lover threw you back Into the frozen ocean of life You never came back

Night fear illusions

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Sometimes/in the middle of the night/awake under a panoply/as caustic as Doré/illustrating Dante

From The Plague Year 2020

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I went to Costco

Lavender Blur

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Donna and I get out of the car...

Where is His Grave

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She took a desolate road as the wind blew.

Extraterrestrial Bingo

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Let me tell you about extraterrestrial bingo: it's loud. They put the speakers over my head. And the microphone keeps moving. Most of the organisms here are old. And from another planet. I see a lot of tentacles. A lot of auras and bugeyes. Everyone seems to know the…

verses versus verses versus verses

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poetry less than poverty: / fair warning to poets, but a good sign.

Ode to Flannery O'Connor

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Gert sat in the car and wiped at the inside of the window while the defroster blasted at full strength. The shards and slivers of ice that networked across the windshield were just thick enough to hinder visibility. Bane wrenched the door open and shoved

Emily's Letter to her Husband's Lover

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I almost kept him on the shelf with all the trophies.

Texturality

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A.The poem of rational progression is dulling.Make the leap. Go beyond juxtaposition to collision.We like poetry that does double duty, triple duty, quadruple duty. We like poetry that mixes the grit, poetry that has the texture of complexity.Reason asserts an…

Two Drunken Elves Don't Know a Good Hobbit When They See One

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Wait for it. It's not the end of the world, it's the end of certain things. It's not that the sky is falling, it's that the coral reefs are dead or dying. I don't know how the ravaged trees have managed to survive this long with us breathing…

air hugs

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but all I can give them now are air hugs

Unnamed

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The child was delivered, set to breathing, and whisked away before Fae Anne could even catch a glimpse of her.

Warm Day, Virus City

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From inside the baking hot car we watched our father, nervous in his face mask and gloves, step through the wooden gate into grandma's front garden. She was waiting for him, thin and lonely behind the frilled lace curtain. She held the iPad in her left hand, and she…

far outside

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I'm staying in swinging all night Hell not just all night but every night I can possibly sink my teeth into

In the Face of Death

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She put on her hat, and walked into the back area, where she found a locker that held her name badge and a tube of chap stick.

The Truth About Storytelling

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irretrievably we tell ourselves stories irretrievably as beaded water slides off our skin

2 Queers on a Seaside Bench Discussing the Ocean

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An impromptu anniversary weekend up the coast.Our hotel was parallel with the highway, which was parallel with the aforementioned bench, which was parallel with a footpath, which was parallel with the shore, which was slowly eroded by the Pacific. He was sitting on the…

The Virus

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It all felt so tentative, he thought. The whole set up. Running water. Electricity. A vast network of instant communication. Food in all the stores. It was the latter that gave him the most concern. He'd never really been hungry. Even in his poorest days, in his early…

Not as a Poet

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She's not a poet, but does she have to be? She comes to the reading to read the poems of her recently dead husband, for she made a vow: that she would read his work at an open mic. Now she is keeping her word. It's her way of keeping him alive or maybe it's his way of…

No Prada, No Burberry, No Gaston Lauvert

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Although it was unlikely that she would witness mobsters racing up or down Wabash Avenue with guns ablast, she paced behind the hotel's ground-floor glass eyeing traffic for fifteen or twenty minutes . . .