Most recent stories

'32 Ford

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Highway Z's white lines turned to dots in the rearview mirror as the needle crept toward one hundred. Buco horsehide warded off the cool night air as the car raced over freshly paved blacktop. Al's smile was as loud as the coup's roar that shattered the calm…

Settling

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But she knew what she would find. She knew it all the moment she felt the sticky fingerprints behind the slat of her old oak slay bed. The fingerprints that would only be left from a person grabbing it from behind their head. The fingerprints that she

The People We Like

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How hard it is to pretend to be someone else. Alone, together, in the silence... I thought about how you must really like me to act quite like that. I wanted to hold your hand and read the unsent love letters.

The Madness of Mass Dance

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Outbreaks of mass communal dancing—sometimes referred to as “choreomania”—occurred in Europe with some frequency in Europe between the 14th and the 18th centuries.

This city like a squall

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Jackhammered men hollow out the building, cart away decade-old works of other men. Exterior walls stand. Rooms have been demolished. In another day see what came before progress. See trees. A squall is coming. Ask about the…

So Twinkle Made Lemonade

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“Just how many different animals try to hide their nakedness?” “Only one. And that'd be us, idiot.”, Twinkle responded. “Then, why don't we mind sometimes showing our bodies?”, she then asked. Twinkle could see it was going to be another…

Etude, Prelude, Nocturne, Polonaise

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proving little more/ than the player’s keyboard dexterity.

Out in the Street

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As kids, we grew up in a city that we swore was suburbia. Nearly every street had a few houses with a kid or two that was missing their front teeth. There were kids we knew well and kids we'd wish we'd known but they lived a few…

Assiduity Twenty Five

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" . . . it's overcast with scattered rain along the Wabash River as I approach the federal correctional complex . . . "

Portrait of the Author as a Poet

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I am an awful poet.

Deerhead Puppets in the Forest

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A spark is a gouged word: stewed to annihilate, scrambled, botched in a pot to dry. Lead us to the quiver, let us tremble. Noon, we paw nails under rugs, run fingertips over books, rip cupboards from hinges and spiral open the machine, for the creature is near the roof or…

Fish Eye

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The only way to get better at this writing thing, thought Melvin...

Boring Boy

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Deslauriers taught that of the five derogatory items a girl could be—bitch, slut, tease, frigid, whore—tease was the worst. Having a German Shepherd at home protected Liz. My family had a cat, female and black.

Arcana Magi Pure Vol.3 - c.1

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Emi stood up and turned to Mayumi. She did not know what else to say. There was a sense of helplessness.

Wild Garden

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Even though it was late November, it still bloomed. Extravagantly. Obviously it had no shame, obviously it reveled in its own beauty.

Incantatory Plea to the Civic on Interstate 75

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May the timing belt stand the stress again

Dancers: Summer '69

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The locals cut stone in quarries, built elevators at the Cummins plant in Columbus, or brewed shine back in the hills between Bean Blossom and Gnaw Bone.

The Sporting Club

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There had been a whore house at the spot for a century, since the cowboys drove cattle up the Chisolm Trail to town, to be loaded onto boxcars bound for the Chicago stockyards.

Pals

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There was a body in the backseat, and they drove through the highways at night to a late night radio show that played 80’s power ballads. He said: “I am really glad you’re here for me.”

Homeland Security

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By the time I got back to the island only Henson was still alive. He didn’t speak; the gun said it all.

Erase Her

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I wake up in the morning and write her name on the white paper napkin I always place in front of me at the kitchen table as I have my first cup of coffee. I write it throughout the day. Twelve or fifteen times. I've done this for exactly twenty-three days. I always…

Necessary Heat

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What is writing, Rick B.? You appear in your photo to be more handsome than your first brother. Sudden memory appears: "Question mark? Curvy: cock. Exclamation! Stiff: prick."

Spøgelse

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Chet Baker mourns for you, New Coke mourns for you, Roddy Piper mourns for you, 8-track cassettes of Humble Pie and Bachman Turner Overdrive mourn for you

The Thief of Words

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That's my memory, kept and clutched as with a sixth sense, that it was a prim Oriental afternoon, with the pink streaks in the sky going God-knows-where down across the park, but very far away. Ghostly, melancholy travellers. Birds met and crashed headlong somewhere up…

Black Eyes, Blue Tears, and Dark Thoughts

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At five a family relative took my life away from me and no one cared

Touchstone: Excerpt 6.

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Some places she knew better than others; some battle sites were more notable or more recent, and always the memories came back on the flood.

Krauts and Doubts

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Moral Dilemmas at Harvard

Nicotine Clouds and Depleting Oxygen

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I spent the summer of 2001 in disguise;

A Man More Like Your Mother

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Does he pack you a lunch when you're running late for work? Even when you're not running late? Does he insist on regular medical check-ups, for which he'll pay because you don't have insurance? Will he disapprove of your objectionable behavior, and not turn the…

Bendable

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“You're bendable,” he said, and then there was this silence as we looked into the space in front of us. I understood what he meant right off and thought it a gift to speak to someone that did not get the words exactly right, but in not doing so, got…