Recommended stories

Notes Via The Coffee Shop

15101510 views77 comments55 favs

Biscuits and gravy. I'm off today, I'm lazy.

Playground

10241024 views66 comments22 favs

The Keds-stubbed grass, toy trucks without wheels, and Band-aids threaded in the sand… Most parenting is vigilance. Seconds ahead of its own sound, a passenger jet spears the heights not far above the treetops, …

Doctor

13681368 views55 comments55 favs

I asked her how she came to be at our little party. We all knew she was an intern. What would she want with the likes of us, the orderlies and techs and strays? She just held up Ed's flyer and said, "Why not?" But she didn't look happy. We fired up and someone said, "Let's…

Mon in the forest: a fragment

13041304 views55 comments44 favs

Mon wakes up surrounded by trees. The light is grey, the trunks black.How long have I slept? he wonders.He doesn't know which way to walk. In every direction, the same prospect of trees. He looks up at a blank sky. No sign even of the sun.***He starts walking. Slowly,…

The Clarity of Loss

15371537 views66 comments44 favs

This year I did not markthe day of your death.I let it slip by in an afternoonfilled with music you'll never hear,words you'll never read,a chorus of voices raised in protestat the unwavering passage of time.I don't need a numberto know that you are gone.Since you went…

The Cliffs at Fayburrow

844844 views44 comments55 favs

Whatever the world is it is alsoyou. This leaves me smiling. I'm glad you arein it. I'm glad for the deepest colorblue like the Mediterranean sea,for instance. Baby orangutans. Forclouds and mushrooms and seahorses. Songs fromtreetops. Whatever the world has it has…

A Terse Invocation of Cuttlefish

13631363 views55 comments55 favs

Once the limits of human commitment to logic are conceded, cuttlefish may in fact be deemed superior logicians to all other aspirants.

Blind

15411541 views55 comments44 favs

My mother saw the Devil everywhere, even in my dance teacher, with his black leotards and chest hair like bean sprouts. "You're flamingos," he'd say in class when we balanced on one foot; when we lept into the air, "Now you're panthers!" I pictured him in a dark robe,…

Cups for Saucers

13971397 views55 comments55 favs

They were everywhere walking right above us or so it seemed, back and forth, back and forth with their lousy, crunching heels making hollow chewed up noises that took all the sweet sounds left on earth and had them march along…

Chemistry (Valentine's Day Massacre)

36183618 views88 comments44 favs

Whenever we’re carressin’, I find you quite engrossin’, I’m filled with vasopressin endorphins and oxytocin.

Neat

12161216 views77 comments33 favs

His audio archive of Bay Area musicians extends along two walls, twenty-five by fifteen feet, in drawers of C.D.s hundreds deep. Where will it go, I asked, permanently.

Angels Carry the Sun excerpt: Chapter One, In the Woods

20622062 views55 comments33 favs

Chapter One In the Woods Everett Finn liked white-bread sandwiches. In June, Flora forfeited all her free cafeteria lunches to sit with him during his quiet lunch breaks in the classroom. "Eleven more days until graduation," she told him. He sat…

Nothing in the World (an excerpt)

20312031 views44 comments55 favs

All night the moon had watched him, and he’d been unable to return its stare. Finally there was sunlight, and Joško took up his rifle and rucksack. He had trouble keeping his balance at first, but gradually his legs steadied.

Otillie

13321332 views66 comments55 favs

Shhh. I am here. Otillie Augustine, from Trieste, an Italian city to you, but when I lived it was part of Austria. Such things as who flies their flags over a city? Not so important after all, after all the losses and the victory speeches. These were not…

No Nows Now

15841584 views55 comments55 favs

. . . did you notice yesterday afternoon how for an entire quarter hour five o’clock itself looked for a few minutes as if it would never arrive?

His Laugh is My Yellow (or explaining skin color to a six-year-old boy)

18211821 views55 comments44 favs

Max is the color of burnt caramelized sugar the sweet crust that decorates our bright enameled pots.

Things being said

11071107 views66 comments55 favs

Things are still being said in a world that sounds like rough bows and straight slicing arrows communicating with (smashing like fists) a poor pool of tired animals. There must also come a time to surprise these same cruel machines…

Best Place To Eat in Town

15921592 views1010 comments33 favs

Often I eat lunch at the hospital. The cafeteria may be the best place to eat in town.

A Natural Consequence of Things

17261726 views66 comments44 favs

Belief is a hammer, like saying the mind is a piece of iron.

Constable Pulce and the Sunny Dystopia

16371637 views55 comments55 favs

Alessandro was no ordinary demon (what demon is?), insofar as he had Constable Pulce's number. In demonly fashion he had Pulce's number in a way Pulce himself did not.

The Invitation

12191219 views99 comments44 favs

The poet could not speak of himself but only of the gradations leading toward him and away. ~ Mark Strand

Darryl, The Biography

12951295 views55 comments55 favs

"I was born very far from where I'm supposed to be. And so I'm on my way home."--Bob Dylan I don't owe you anything. If I'm a recluse what does it have to do with you? I have the right to be poor. Some things cannot be explained away by letters that…

the weather past where roads end

11631163 views55 comments55 favs

a soft wooden clatter, wind-battered reeds/bound to the banks of ditches rank,/ill-purposed waters slide into low swamps/whose waters into rivers seep and crawl.

Unsent

13091309 views55 comments44 favs

this is where we end -- the exorbitant eye of forgotten days.

Nepenthe

955955 views99 comments44 favs

Alas, the wind, the rain/ and plate tectonics take temples,/ fire and sediment papyrus and clay,

There are Grandmas and there is my Grandma.

27212721 views55 comments44 favs

Last night Grandma got her walker stuck in the snow almost up to her tits. I feel the mark of a dutiful grandson is to come to her aid. And I always do. Even though she usually gets back home at 2 00 a.m. — or maybe 3 — sometimes she's late and we worry but I…

Stretching to Understand

14881488 views99 comments33 favs

You looked like someone I didn't want to know. I guess that's why I got in the car that night. My penchant for self-destruction was aroused by your black nail polish and the lavender circles under your eyes. You looked like someone that could hurt me, yeah, that's why I got…

And then the Heat Broke

19271927 views77 comments22 favs

She did not know Robert’s skin was sliced and bruised from the twelve pound ball and chain locked to his ankle for sixteen hours that night.

Flood

15771577 views77 comments44 favs

My mother's afraid the dog will drown. It's raining and our street is flooding and the dog is standing on top of his doghouse. My mother is pregnant. I can stand beneath her stomach and not even see her face. I watch her from the kitchen window. She's shoeless. She holds…

Fatherhood 101

13841384 views99 comments44 favs

The instructor moved over to the whiteboard and wrote in big block letters “FOOTBALL” and then crossed it out. “You should just never treat your newborn like a football. That means no passing it or punting it.