Recommended stories

K Model

10111011 views99 comments66 favs

Plans were all set. We were leaving this town. We'd been creeping around long enough and Marla wanted nothing more than to get out and away from the shallow, old bastard she married. “Fuck his mansion and fuck his country club”, she said. We both agreed that he…

Grief Has No Welcome Garment

12101210 views88 comments55 favs

Twice burned, it buries its graves.

Tales from an Indiscriminate Record Collection

12751275 views88 comments33 favs

45s I’ve kept wrapped in newspaper in the attic. These are all mine. Some doubling up in sleeves. Some pushing tears in the seams.

Never Been Down to Lonely Street

16031603 views1111 comments55 favs

“This is not turning out to be a wholesome project,” my brother hissed into the phone one night. “Yo, Alan, it’s ELVIS. It’s American gothic, and the child needs to know the underbelly of the myth,” I hissed back.“Did you, or did you not, wear makeup to

How to Pass among Mortals

10841084 views99 comments44 favs

Take no form or face beautiful enough to cause warfare, or that which would provoke inanimate objects to song. If a tree wishes to flower in your presence, request that this happen very slowly.

Wax Off

11181118 views1111 comments66 favs

The time has come to scrape the wax from my menorah.

The Cicada's Cry

13021302 views11 comment22 favs

In the cicada's cry No sign can foretell How soon it must dieBasho "Hear the locusts?" The woman lifts the child's head. "Hear em, baby?" The child looks blankly in the…

Make Music, Not Love

11041104 views77 comments77 favs

We are/no more than heartbeats on repeat.

A Letter to the Girl I May or May Not Have Slept With Last Night

19961996 views1111 comments33 favs

Can I really be blamed? Look at the circumstantial evidence: you wore that skirt, which can hardly be called a skirt. More like a very wide plaid belt.

Two More Poems

11621162 views66 comments77 favs

1. Weeds of the World (Unite!) We invade the invaders and they invade us, these little Blooming weeds. They raise five flowers and let them blow Into the winds like sheets of stars. All of us Steer by their turning tide. All of us will eventually …

In the Sun

447447 views1010 comments55 favs

The light was bright andthey sat on the railing of the long wooden bridge in the sun. She looked up at her father."Oh Daddy, where did you go?" she asked.He was young with black shinny hair blowing in the wind. "To Heaven, little girl,"She shook her head."What's…

Blank Future

14311431 views00 comments22 favs

I might as well just keep driving. Past my exit. Beyond my job. Just drive. Until the tank runs out of gas. A blank future is better than this bleak one.

Bloody Vodka

11621162 views99 comments66 favs

Broken glass attacks me

Silence

10191019 views99 comments66 favs

I let go of my properties, my work.

Stop

10451045 views66 comments77 favs

The dead girl was his niece’s daughter. Only thirteen years old.

String Money

10571057 views1111 comments66 favs

I said hey man, how you doin’? He looked up and nodded but his shades flashed and I couldn’t see his eyes.

Eyes that Said Don't Leave Me Here

14281428 views33 comments33 favs

Two friends follow the train tracks by their neighborhood.

Wilma

10941094 views1212 comments66 favs

Every morning, Wilma's husband Richard would cross the street and visit with a neighbor, always after the neighbor's husband left for work. Wilma was a loner, never bothered with neighbors. She enjoyed sitting on her patio in her lounge chair,…

Edward Ogle the Third

11971197 views66 comments66 favs

Assimilated wheat germ integrated ant worm the capital of brazil.

Decision Mountain

10061006 views77 comments66 favs

For decades the land the village sat on had switched its allegiance between two countries.

Birthday

118118 views1212 comments66 favs

...

Winter Kills

16391639 views1414 comments55 favs

And on nights like those I conjure Martha's childhood, a little girl who could make the whole world fall in love with her, with those goddam big seashell eyes, enticing adults to fall into a blue-green sea that never ends, never promises survival.

Pomegranate juice thief walks home

913913 views88 comments66 favs

That is a six-word story. Notice that the meaning does not change with the word count. Syllabic count: pentameter (ten). Keep these commas.

Flower-Gathering

27522752 views88 comments55 favs

I did not understand its meaning until college when I learned that Frost would take long walks—the inspiration for so many of his poems—and would leave his wife at home while he did. And just before he left, she would guilt-trip him just a little by walk

The Bird Nests of Lascaux

11291129 views66 comments66 favs

With their brightly-colored bits of found string woven into the walls of their nests to teach their baby birds what the worms of the future will look like. Somewhat like the cave paintings of Lascaux for early man in France, when hunti

Bruegel days, nights by Bosch

654654 views77 comments44 favs

no matter where we sit or how we stare— / all parades now march away to one day.

Albert Walks

17941794 views88 comments55 favs

Albert Walks When Albert walks he is astonished. Ripe fruit falls to the ground at his feet, offering itself. The earth's tremor rumbles, celebratory, through his mended shoes and up his shins. The birds darting through the sky above …

Neural

11811181 views66 comments66 favs

Then I am wearing a brightly colored raincoat while sitting on a deck among hundreds of tiny glowing spores

Quatrains Written on Stolen Time

886886 views88 comments66 favs

It is the fragrance of decay/ as paint, polymers and dyes/ outgas molecules of themselves

Optimism

103103 views88 comments66 favs

She doesn't think about bad things anymore. She used to worry about nukes. She'd imagine Hiroshimas everywhere. She'd imagine the seas rising, the planet a string of deserts, polar bears drowning, butterflies shriveling. The world…