Most recent stories

Command Voice

21042104 views1818 comments1212 favs

Go to your room. Children are meant to be seen not heard.

Smoking

66546654 views1414 comments99 favs

"She gave me a "you're fucking stupid, kid" look and handed me a of cigarettes. It was all downhill from there."

mythical son

10041004 views33 comments22 favs

I would have given your son to you. I would have had him in a heartbeat. And I would have showed him your inner beauty, even though you were absent. I would have hidden nothing from his nature. I would have given him everything and anything he needed, s

The Birds (2)

20022002 views1010 comments77 favs

The birds were stacked up in the branches of a pine tree behind the feeder. Several were sitting on the fence. “They’re massing,” she said.

Through the Looking Glass: Humpty Dumpty 2011

21362136 views2121 comments1111 favs

“When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”

Big English

39893989 views3939 comments2424 favs

I hit the pole near Whited Avenue a year to the day.

Dear Envelope Said the Stamp

18081808 views1212 comments77 favs

I have no more use for the beautiful words you used to like so much for me tosend you alone. See my feathers donot so much hide me now as giveme away; I tend to feel farfrom home. Forgive me this. Theend jumped by me quicker than anorange flower cricket on its…

The Assistant

14681468 views66 comments33 favs

The Assistant is lost again in a grid city. Again she feels disconnected from the world. Where she is the sound has been switched off.

the musk and the drama

980980 views44 comments11 fav

Shame must search the soul, broken, original, with its primitive juices stirred. Moved until now only by the musk, only the stroll you lived with, the worry, the sorrow, the drama – may I never conceal or recover from it! Yes, I might beg or steal the

Waiting

19911991 views2121 comments1010 favs

He grew red-faced at her quiet words, "I'm pregnant."

Glass

22032203 views1919 comments1111 favs

Her bulldozer of a husband died five years ago.

To Explain the Sasquatch Sitter

17511751 views11 comment11 fav

And I was going into the visions you get before you go to sleep. And I heard her moan. It was so beautiful. I moaned back. And she moaned again. And I did too. We pretended I guess that we didn’t hear each other. That we were moaning in our sleep.

Burma

16351635 views55 comments33 favs

Our mothers died in childbirth. Taken in by the village, our new mothers taught us to wave at the river boats, to sell our trinkets to tourists. They offered us coins of a foreign currency and little pathetic smiles. By nightfall, our fingers bled. Then came…

Thirteen Ways of Nevermore: Arkansas, 12/31/2010

20872087 views99 comments66 favs

MIDNIGHT all day. Bleak December. A chiaroscuro, snowing blackbirds. (Pas de cinq mille, in B minor.)

Mirko's Morning

13911391 views55 comments55 favs

"Your loss," she cackled, stumbled to the bed in the corner, hummed a tuneless song, and began snoring, too.

Valentine

14551455 views44 comments11 fav

"His middle name is Valentine, and when asked about it, he isn't sure why."

Blue Crabs

12531253 views22 comments00 favs

The perfect murder, and it’s not even murder.

Pollock's Last Snowflake?

18051805 views66 comments22 favs

The question posed a voluptuous riddle. Were these frenzied silhouettes gestures of Jackson Pollock’s dribble?

amaryllis

11991199 views44 comments11 fav

On such warm nights when wet sex happens suddenly, please, remember the amaryllis. How they’ll push up out of the ground in August after the first real heat opens the air. I too was born in such weather. Balmy nights when heat lightning beats in the

Paul Shaffer's Gold

16621662 views44 comments11 fav

Paul Shaffer and his cloned henchman Mini Paul come rattling through the early morning sky in a modified World War I biplane.

Dinner at the Harmony Restaurant

31613161 views1717 comments1111 favs

Balling my fists, I banged them on the retro-formica tabletop. The taste of pufferfish balls in an oleander-infused reduction with a seaweed and pomegranate side-salad tossed in a geranium-rottweiler vinaigrette rose in my throat.

Momo and Me

18881888 views00 comments00 favs

Momo told me not to mind her, but I did. At night, after he'd tucked me in, I could hear him on the phone in the living room, talking for a long time. Early this morning he woke me up and gave me my backpack. ‘Put some clothes in here', he said. ‘We're going on a trip.'

whoring

25082508 views88 comments44 favs

I watched myself tilt my head and coyly smile in the bottom right corner of the chat window-the two off-kilter lamps in the room were casting an asymmetrical shadow over half my face.

Three Poems in March, after Baca

19591959 views88 comments55 favs

I could love them all, your people, / Learn their differences, speak their tongues, / When there is no one there to hold you / But me, my arms would be wide enough / To hold armies of your need. Do not forget.

If You Are Without Mercy

908908 views66 comments44 favs

"The opposite of fear is not courage but compassion."--Peter J. Gomesyou are going to die amost pitiful death from your own tearsof crushing boredom. Crying overyour self you will probablynever understand how it is asimple blue-capped flower savesthe world,…

Half a Lotus

18911891 views2323 comments1010 favs

An Ayurvedic astrologer tells her that she is a child of India. Is a girl born in Indiana a mistake of just two letters on a Scrabble board?

kroy hearts destiny

21282128 views1212 comments1212 favs

r luv iz gud enuf 4 a tat2

When the Translator Disappears, the Translation Withers and Dies

32683268 views3333 comments2626 favs

She pined for the return of the trans­la­tor who / became mes­sianic in her eyes.

Conjugal Visit

58385838 views11 comment00 favs

Sandy stood with three year old Josh, in line at the Santa Cruz County Correctional Facility in Watsonville. They were waiting to visit Tim, who she had met when she moved back to California after breaking up with Josh's father. If you call fleeing in fear…

our notorious youth

12621262 views22 comments11 fav

Be aware the dog is king, radiant, emitting many beams, renewed by and restored by his fullness, his satiety. In many ways underlying all our hearts and minds, out of our notorious youth, ever the flower of our flesh on fire like a little reed next to the dried…