Most recent stories

Slouching Towards Bethlehem

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We didn't wear shoes in the summer, except for Sunday school and church. The soles of our feet were black and tough as shoe leather.

No Dogs Allowed

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They were an interesting young couple. Tom was a big man with rugged features, though not handsome. His face was deeply pock-marked with the scars that are sometimes left over from a terrible bout with adolescent acne. His wife – though I was never cert

Fuck Yeah America

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After sportscasters announced the assassination and while the reverberations of the words were still fading people were already shouting

Low Tide

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Her whole life was lived between high tide and low tide, moments of giggling grandeur and moments of sheer emptiness.

Where Do You Get Your Poetic Inspiration?

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The only magazine Auden subscribed to was Scientific American, a publication I had previously scorned as the trade journal of pre-med students and Nobel Prize winners.

Easy Lessons

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A hinge in my heart is broken.

Blind

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In this coaly no-time/ strewn with fallen stars,/ you are a roaming panther/ and I am a tangle of snakes.

Liberation, 2

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It was Phil Collins on MTV, “In the Air Tonight,” that helped cement it for me. It was the beginning of the end of my marriage. Well, not exactly the true beginning of the end. You would have to go pretty far back, honestly, to find the true root of it

The Girls of Spring

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The girls of spring, they’ll stop your heart When they forsake cosmetic art They practiced back when skies were grey and clouds obscured the light of day.

Sinister Age of the Draft

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The so-called good, a weak but whiny lot, who actually clung to that abstract of "justice for all," would tattle to Mrs. Pufry...Mzzz Puffy, she hit me...Mzzz Puffy he said the bad word...Mzzz Puffy, I gotta go...Mzzz Puffy, Thomas is hanging in the cloak

Full Frame

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A month before the real flowers came, amputated trees for 31 miles were festooned with pink blossoms. The petals were tufts of Fiberglass insulation shorn from houses incapable of withstanding 260-mph winds -- more than twice the punch Katrina delivered t

Three short-shorts

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Wake up! But it was already too late for Charles.

One Last Word

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Almost 24 hours ago in Pakistan, Osama Bin Laden was sleeping just as he had slept every night for the hundreds of days prior; comfortable in a million dollar compound with his son and advisors around him...

Ponies

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“The moon is a monk,” you said.

Dangerous Questions

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Shirley stubbed her cigarillo out on a dead chunk of honeycomb.

Waiting for His Wife

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"Dad, I already told you about your wife. She’s not coming."

Cassie Fly

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...the relatives didn't seem nearly as fucked up as she thought they would be considering...

am I still alive, yes

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She read her briefs as she sat at the café table in her smart dark blue suit, and she altered the wording on the briefs in front of her, and she would check the watch at her wrist as if there were a pulse there: Am I still alive, yes. Am I still alive,

The Needle and the Damage Done

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“She never knew her, you know?” Chief Jack Gardner, retired, said to the duty officer absently, thumbing a well-worn photo in his rough calloused hands. His gravelly voice cracked a bit when he said it, catching his throat.

30x30

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30 poems in 30 days

The Perfumed Kitten

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We named her Big Cat—I don’t know why. Maybe because she was already grown when we got her, unlike the kittens we’d seen in the pet store window that Dad wouldn’t let us have.

The Arrival

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Everybody knew it would happen. It didn’t happen exactly when or how they thought it would, but nonetheless it happened. “I told you it would happen,” a bearded man told his wife.

Coalheart

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He is sleek with hearts and I see a different name etched onto each one.

The 11th Arrondissement

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I concluded that Parisian sexuality must be partially indebted to the cricket or grasshopper. The entrance to their flat was a wood door scarred by scriptures common to places frequented by people who have not yet made their mark on the world.

Change in Status

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First, he wrote it in a patch of new, wet cement one night at the intersection, for everyone to see, “Tad Loves Kimberley.” Maybe they were still in high school, or one of them worked at the café on the corner, and the other at the ice cream shop. Then

Consolations of Quantum Mechanics

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The "Many Worlds" theory, applied.

WHITE

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I reached for that hair and the air zagged white...

Where They Have to Take You In

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Sunday morning beginning with a bang. Accused, found wanting, sentenced.

postcards from penelope

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fun fact: a doll's legs will twitch while being scalped but only for just a little bit

Song of Another Country

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And she warms her hands on fresh-cut gizzards, And he forgets the taste of honeyed peaches