Most recent stories

A Piece of Him

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the / future is now incomplete

Woman Outside Funeral Home Lighting Up

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If you ever find yourself outside a funeral home lighting up contemplating the future of the unknown, contemplate this Maybe the cigarette’s wet on your lip and you are wondering why Or in the middle of the night you are lying awake and try sa

Urban Skunks

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Urban skunks want to visit your neighborhood and be bold in your neighborhood.

In Memoriam

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One by one, cars filed into the cemetery, pelted by the summer rain under a gun-metal sky. The procession moved slowly, a series of brake lights and headlights, too close together, too far apart; there were sedans and SUVs, mini-vans and pick-up trucks, shiny new vehicles…

MILOSK BLONDYNKI

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Milosk had lived in the hills above Stari Vlah a long time, and while he did not care much for political matters, he knew the men were heroes of the state and deserved what Milosk could provide for them...

Confessions of a Latter-Day Computerholic

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

Tonight I Am The Zipper

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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

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...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

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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

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

Blowing Up While Fading Out

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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

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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

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www.echapbook.com/fiction/ratch

The Trash of Spring

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Winter offers pitting salty sand clouds

Sees, Kindness, and Made

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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

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

The Hotel Where Esenin Hanged Himself

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I walk by the hotel where Esenin hanged himself.

Luminous Nights, 7

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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

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

The Ships of the Neva

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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

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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

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

Masquerade II

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. . . 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?

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Got me a 50 pound bat ray.

Legs Unwilling

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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“I wrote a story about you today.”