Most recent stories

point

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The River

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The sinuous river of your childhood. Do you remember how it slid between your young legs before winding away, making its lively and bubbly sounds. You would have made it light-headed with your games and screams. When you lingered late in the afternoon after school, and you…

Masters

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"... he with much to teach, I who had much to learn..."

My Summer Vacation

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Apple is apple plum plum that is a kiss without a tongue

There’s No Peace In The World

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Then there was the time I splurged, hoping a higher-priced phone might keep me from slamming it against the wall.

A Chosen Voice

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While the shadows of lives that once were still hid away, others who survived tried to stand on their own two feet and walk the distance again and tell what happened and what it was all like.

World

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Making me hate language

Ballgame

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She knew that she was bland and overweight and dull; that what was beautiful in her was locked away like a tiny maiden, far, far away in a tower, too difficult to find or reach. She must face her lot, grateful for her family and her work.

THERE AIN'T NO REAL GROWN-UP'S NOWHERE NO-HOW by Leanna MacFarlane

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[Huh!]

Control

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Paul and Mary Jo lived in an apartment at the top of a long, dark flight of stairs that were so high, I remember as if it were yesterday thinking, the night she pushed him down the stairs, he would surely be dead by the time he hit the landing at the…

a prayer for lambs

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unsteady, they try to rise

Hromada

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Not for the short attention span

Trees and Strangers

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The summer I was eleven years old....

with and without absent lines

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Across the vacant vanished . . .

two love tankas

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December scent rains coming down sodden leaves underfoot

Lazarusfish

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Scuttling on his knees now, he crossed to the other side of the boat and dropped the fish into a bucket of water. He knew what he had to do next.

The Straps and the Electric

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The winter sun was going down and she watched it out the window.Light like shards of glass,time had melted.It took hold.She was held down by brown leather straps and she couldremember the smell of incense and little hands and little eyesof an infant cold on the bed.She…

So Many Questions?

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“Are you my neighbor in 3D?” Was she?

The Magic of the Old Man

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As far as I knew it was just an old man and his wife who lived in this house, but not really. I mean if you had seen what every person on that block had, you would have realized that many lived there, well many beings.

Hotel Venice and the Bohemian Blue

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“Time to check out,” I say looking at sailboats and surfers gliding on the blue Pacific from the open window of my hotel room in Venice Beach. I inhale minty incense and gaze down at a dark-skinned woman in a sombrero seated behind a cloth-covered fold

Meanwhile It Was Nuclear War

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“Whup!” he said, as a lorry pulled up in front. ¶ “Here’s your lorry.”

Adultery

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-- Adultery I took her out to a drive-in movie and we had sex in the back seat of my car. Then went into the concession stand to get something sweet after so much sex, and everyone was in there doing the same thing, you could tell by…

The Optimism Of Despair

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He felt sick at heart, as if he'd just been told he'd been fired from a job to which he'd devoted 60 years of his professional life. And for no good reason; the profession no longer existed. It had slipped into obsolescence, like blacksmithing at the beginning of the…

Concrete

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The man who makes the noose

Professor _________

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"First we’ll get a good workout at the discotheque where my lady friend works. Don’t worry, she’s already arranged for a friend of hers to attend so you won’t have to suffer the indignity of being a third wheel."

R.I.P. Ann Bogle

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It is with great sadness I announce the passing of Ann Bogle on February 28, 2023 after a brief illness. Ann was longtime contributor and editor of these pages and a champion of small press and emerging writers.I knew Ann since the late 1970's when she was an undergraduate…

Left On The Scrap Heap

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Daylight and cold sensed as an abstract, a number in my mind. Air thin, polluted, lacking oxygen. But the Recyclers are at it again.

One Of These Dreams ...

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Imagine a morning without dawn, without daylight ... The night birds still hoot, the flowers wait for the light to change their make-up, black birds have locked their beaks. A morning unlike any other ... The moon above continues to reign over the milky way, the stars to…

Some Things Can't Be Fixed

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Orchids strewn over the floor...

Lips Like Oysters

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By the end of my Saturday night shift at the Oyster Bar I look like some kind of filthy nurse