Most recent stories

One Last Hurrah, #1

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She was about 35 or so and noticeably pregnant. She was near hysteria when she knocked on our apartment door, right across the street in L.A. from a convent. But she took one last desperate wild look at me, standing at the door. I saw the animal in her ey

Sorting through two forms of stupid

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Does modeling come easily to me? Am I made for the camera? Not exactly. When I pose for a shot, I feel, well, like a poser, really.

The Accidental Arsonist

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Henry yells at her when she lights cigarettes and candles. But this is her small secret ritual, her way of making good with the god she is no longer sure she believes in...

The Virtues of Nerdy Women

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Back in college I had carnal knowledge of a woman who danced bare-breasted and frenzied as a Bacchante.

The Metope Prophecy

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When his brown eyes met the lapis colored stones representing hers, she leaned forward from her exalted position and whispered to him, “Save me.”

And the Canon Rap Got Played

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Back in the sixties, I chanced upon a list of books. That’s right. Sifting a black garbage bin, I found the long lost canon. Seizing the moment, I snatched the list, and cradled it in my palms. I felt proud and patriotic for saving such a noble list f

Wattle and Daub

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~ ! ~

By the Time the Oceans Rise

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By the time the oceans rise/ enough for Kansans to care about,

Yogurt

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Later, you've hit that four shot espresso limit; you've snarfed down that too rich mushroom korma… gone before you tasted it.

February: Letter From a Friend After Fifteen Years

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And she finds calm in the word “Easter,” thinking about chocolate and, for some reason, our dog Panda. I think of you tonight, Linda...

The 3-Step Secret to a Good Life

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Warren Jeffries left this girlfriend of his named Karen, who was also a poet, and overnight she announced she’d gone back to being a lesbian, she’d so had it with MEN! She did a reading of her new series of Sappho poems at Cody’s Bookstore, and it was at

First Sex

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After our date, my sister, who has a boyfriend, came over with her Weimaraner. I started instantly to tell her of my sex with Nils. She shirked the conversation, tried to change the subject, and more than once, I persisted. I wanted her to hear about it.

Cleveland Clinic

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Allie didn't share that moment with Jim. That moment he spoke about whenever they made new friends as a couple— that moment he planned to recount at their engagement party.

Deviance

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I tried to enlighten them. For my trouble, they tried to have me deprogrammed. I condemned their narrowness of mind; they pitied me my naiveté. I ridiculed their religious bourgeois complacency, but they really didn’t know what I was talking about.

A Plea for Artists to Be Activists for Women’s Rights: Don’t Explain

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When I feel the sort of longing that sneaks up on me unawares, the sort held for the wrong kind of person that can make a woman clutch her heart in the night and sullies her blood with unwanted dreams in a thinking person's landscape, I hear, too, the deep…

As Many Will Fall

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tumbling for you from afar as close-up. They will rewrite your dancing form like a proper magical spell on all their maddest days, using the branches of cherished trees dipped into the trapped wells of certain hosts of …

What Momma Draws on Windows

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...the woman of the sun, twelve stars around her head, the moon at her feet.

The One-Dollar Minister

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The man could be a total brute, though the truth was he had the softest of hearts too. A real gentle giant. But get him going on a drunk jag with too much ouzo in his system, and look out.

Hush

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You think you are a perpetual motion machine, free of thermodynamic law. I’m telling you, you’re wrong.

Genealogy

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You are an heiress to drunks. The statues of your forefathers stagger, memorialized by gravity, their faces half-lit eternally, as they reach into refrigerators for another something to keep away the cold empty.

Cranshaw on the Road / Chapel Access

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"Why so ornery?" she asked.

Days of Future, Past

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Though bleached white as snow,/ Eric Cantor’s teeth broke/ much as any others would

Light Shot Water

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Where I grew up, you did not venture casually into ocean waters.

Luminous Nights, 9

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Both of us agreed we needed to break up, and have some time apart before we ended up killing each other. Before Robbie left Chicago to begin classes out in California, he made a promise to me — that he intended one day to return and marry me. He sai

Free As A Bird

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The cell was crowded, barely enough room to swing a cat.

Daddy Walked the Pits

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Seems like the tar just got hold of Daddy somehow. What is it about asphalt and a man?

IRS Tries Eunuchs for Tough Tax Collection Cases

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“I’ve seized a family’s satellite dish, I’ve put a lien on a guy’s blue tick hound–everything,” Suggins says with a laugh.

The Floating Dock

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Charley carried the corpse over to the dinghy and tossed it into the pool of rain water collected inside. The headless snake swerved through the water, oblivious to its fate, powered perhaps by exposed nerves and muscle memory.

Even The Air Has Fingers

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Fingers amaze me. They uncoil from a fist into a star of infinite capacity.

77 Words About Nothing (4.05.2012)

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I sold my ego to pay a parking ticket. And then I wrote 77 words about mental health.