Most recent stories

Confessions of a Latter-Day Computerholic

845845 views1010 comments22 favs

Boy, it is weird out there, talking to real people!

Tonight I Am The Zipper

21332133 views1313 comments1111 favs

It’s so hard to get to know people these days. Even the social ones wall you out with politeness. Like jackknives with pearl handles in a display case.

Kimberlina

13291329 views22 comments11 fav

...She smells like Mentholadium all the time which is one of them old lady smells. When I get up there, she says, “I’ll scrub the bee jesus out of you little girl,” and by God, I have a purty good bath that day.

The Watchman

16781678 views1212 comments1010 favs

The coffins pile up gnawing dust on the glass panes to the rims of my binoculars. Shadowy cracks of stifling proportions, gliding over my eyes a requiem of mahogany. At dawn they heave between the workers’ hands, leave their resting places for a green tra

Leningrad's Sister City And Her Cuban Sandwiches

10321032 views22 comments11 fav

It began not so innocently with voyeuristic tendencies. the sound of concrete and confetti in the night.

Blowing Up While Fading Out

17081708 views88 comments44 favs

It calmed the guilt in my heart while kids reveled, laughed, and "made time" with the neighborhood girls on that final night of freedom. No one would talk to those girls again.

Biography of a Splotch in a Parking Lot

14361436 views77 comments66 favs

She hadn’t died. She wasn’t a ghost. She wasn’t even invisible. She just wasn’t see-able.

How the Sixties Ended, a new echapbook online

693693 views11 comment00 favs

www.echapbook.com/fiction/ratch

The Trash of Spring

708708 views88 comments33 favs

Winter offers pitting salty sand clouds

Sees, Kindness, and Made

17561756 views1212 comments1010 favs

SeesWe fell into this lake together and traced the clean soft lines straight back to ourselves, with a carefree laugh, ha ha ha-- an embarrassing ease. This small miracle does tend to put in orbit something high flying besides clouds into the sky inside of…

The Last Quiet Morning

16831683 views1313 comments99 favs

Things don’t happen here, life is so boring in this little Irish town.

The Hotel Where Esenin Hanged Himself

22122212 views2929 comments2626 favs

I walk by the hotel where Esenin hanged himself.

Luminous Nights, 7

906906 views00 comments00 favs

Robbie took me out to Fox River on his father's ski boat one day, as he often did — but this time it was my eighteenth birthday. That was when he opened up his robe and showed me all there was to show of himself, begging me to make love to him, saying h

SNOW JOB

12771277 views1616 comments1313 favs

One sneaker in the middle of the A-Plus Pawn lot...

The Ships of the Neva

13301330 views22 comments33 favs

Where in the shadows of these raw streets does love last longer than a flyer?

You Couldn't Pay For a Review This Good, But I Did

779779 views1010 comments00 favs

I’ve previously tried the old-fashioned route to get my books reviewed, calling up editors, asking friends who work at newspapers and magazines to put in a good word for me, stalking . . . I mean, contacting freelancers.

Improvisation on a few lines by Mark Strand

10231023 views11 comment11 fav

I am tripping on poetry. Purple ink drips from my eyes like ergot of rye.

Masquerade II

11771177 views1414 comments44 favs

. . . once you start reading and thinking about what he's saying, it's like looking at the reflection of your soul in a mirror . . .

You Wear Camo?

18101810 views99 comments66 favs

Got me a 50 pound bat ray.

Legs Unwilling

12511251 views11 comment11 fav

Summer bakes the metal playground slide to ripples. Still, kids line up. Sadists, all of them. Lucky enough to choose pain. Max feels it every breath, unwanted.

I've Seen You Naked

13091309 views55 comments33 favs

and watched you grinning from your opulent spinning cages and although you were never less than always remarkably perfumed, toappeal I'm guessing to the sniffing about masses, to me they've…

Thank ya, Jesus

23642364 views2222 comments2020 favs

We were always thrilled that the moon worked the night shift. In high school, often bored with the two drive-in movies, we'd sometimes go to tent revivals on our dates and get healed or get saved depending upon what that “tent-housed”…

Point of Grace

13681368 views66 comments55 favs

Say the world is a smudged charcoal drawing. Slit from its frame, smuggled out of the Vatican. Don't say it couldn't happen. Who would know.

Luminous Nights, 6

801801 views00 comments00 favs

We had to walk up to the fourth floor, and on those steamy hot Chicago summer nights in August, sometimes I would strip off my top before we even got in the door. I lived with my Siamese cat, whose name was Caesar.

A Story About You

13281328 views44 comments22 favs

“I wrote a story about you today.”

Ripping Good Poetry Lures Boys Who Curse With Verse

12581258 views66 comments33 favs

Pringy practices an aesthetic variant of the “muscular Christianity” that is a tradition at Groton; a program of Sunday poetry classes for boys who violate the school’s ban on swearing.

Context and Confessional Poetry

11771177 views11 comment11 fav

I like babies and little kids, more than some people but goddamn, children's laughter out of nowhere (in the night, when you're not expecting it) is creepy. I don't like slugs smeared like nightmare goo on my summer-bare feet, I could do without them in …

The Bicycle Mechanic

16171617 views1414 comments1212 favs

The hour reflected those pleasant moments when evening hunger can be satiated by anticipation alone, before the pangs become demanding.

Don't You Think

973973 views66 comments44 favs

a war forever seems so sadly stupid, pretty petty on our perky part in the ongoing play, a terrible loosed thing to have to always keep holding up our hostage hands to-- at least when being compared to…

The Mouth Is A Swell Place To Invent Things

11201120 views33 comments22 favs

Yesterday I saw Marco Polo getting a tattoo on East Olive. He was practicing Mandarin Chinese with the tattoo artist who was also Chinese. He got a yin yang symbol on his bicep. He looked to the east and saw the hills lift themselves into sky. He grimaced