Recommended stories

Trapeze Artist

16691669 views1515 comments1313 favs

Solitude is such an excellent alternative to suicide.

Some Assembly but No Singularity Required

13461346 views1818 comments1414 favs

The phone rings. The oven beeps./ The locomotive whistles and howls.

Klonakilty

12591259 views1414 comments1313 favs

Magdalena White Herrington praised the lucky stars who’d sent her the Klonakilty ghosts.

Testament (complete)

15181518 views1616 comments1313 favs

Their nouns are few and stark./ Ours are numerous and dappled/ or subtly shaded and shadowed/ by circumstance and possibility.

Here Comes the Sun

15911591 views1717 comments1313 favs

She lies on her stomach by the side of the pool staring into her towel. On her back, I can make out a pastel isthmus, surgery's pink art or charlatan's scab, I can't tell which. She is beautiful as rare roast beef is beautiful.

The Tale of Pregnant Tinkerbelle

15021502 views33 comments33 favs

Everyone was shocked when they heard Tinkerbelle was six days gone and had got so heavy she couldn't fly. Who could have done it, everyone asked, but Tinkerbelle wasn't telling. So no one knew. That isn't true. I knew, and in this Declaration I swear I will tell…

Four Brief Poems

13711371 views2020 comments1212 favs

The eyes, luminous and large- each an infinite bright blue ocean Wind ruffles feathers My ego and vanity also/ encourage me not to wear a mask. An aberration/ that general circumstances/ will remedy, and soon.

Arrogant Magnolia,

11951195 views1616 comments1212 favs

ARROGANT MAGNOLIA, the first to open all, poised ten feet above our fuss. …

Throwing Pencils

20562056 views1414 comments1010 favs

I can never tell if he’s drunk or using some sort of substance or if perhaps his brain just doesn’t fire at the pace that we have come to accept as normal.

Flexeril and Hydrocodone and Want

20712071 views1515 comments1212 favs

Flexeril and Hydrocodon... For my back

Trompe l'oeil

12011201 views1818 comments1313 favs

After her grief had subsided, the wife felt immediate relief. / Suddenly she was free to abandon or pursue loneliness

Pastoral Hide & Seek

23202320 views1717 comments1212 favs

The sea dies where a cello torques on sand, leaving me without its compass. An old clock sings.

Still Life in a Bowl

17641764 views2020 comments1313 favs

I sprinkle seaweed over the water and all twelve rise to feed. Two of them went down the hole but knew to come up. A toilet has mouths and caverns, not a bad place at all for fish.

Fear Us, Oh Yes.

15831583 views1919 comments1212 favs

Start now. Make lists. Call long-lost friends. Say what needs saying. Raise hell.

Kill Allan

24312431 views1616 comments1212 favs

I still want to kill Allan, because he now is unseen

The Code is on the Street

16071607 views2929 comments1111 favs

They may have heard parts of it, the memoir in me. Then I took a trip—to New York, though they wouldn't have known where—and when I returned, I was entirely mum unless I had the phone with me.

Coat and Shoes

22832283 views1616 comments1111 favs

Walking in to work from an unfamiliar direction, I saw her, on a street I had never been down before. I was coming from his place, for the first time, after the first time. The first time, but not the first date. That's not me. I'm not one to... not one who... He worked…

Hart Crane Pantoum No. 1

15131513 views1818 comments1313 favs

One must be drenched in words.

Mitzvah (wc:55)

17081708 views2222 comments1212 favs

So, how did they meet? After years and years of starvation and gruesomeness and lack of human contact because there were no humans left, only walking corpses, a woman gently lifted the sixty-pound dead man's penis with a cool washrag and wiped him clean. The dead…

Sunk

24192419 views1010 comments77 favs

The weight of my heart dragged me in dangerous directions.

Late Autumn

16271627 views1818 comments1313 favs

Rough sonnet about faded love

Chimera (a wild and unrealistic dream or notion)

22682268 views1010 comments1010 favs

... while I lie, cool as a nectar cream snowball, in my Maggie The Cat slip, painting my toenails a color called Bad Influence

Lingering Over Language

18771877 views2121 comments1212 favs

The mornings he comes in

A Nun Walks Into A Library...

23822382 views1515 comments1111 favs

Library life is full of surprises.

Ante Meridiem

20592059 views2828 comments1212 favs

Still dipped in night...

The Model

15191519 views1414 comments1313 favs

My art teacher hated Salvador Dali.

Dunes

25712571 views1919 comments1212 favs

I went out through another cold still morning erasing my steps behind me not because I did not want to be followed but because I did not want to find my way back again.

Dinner at the Harmony Restaurant

31063106 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.

Contentment

20872087 views1919 comments1313 favs

On the bed he tickled her until she was crying with laughter. And then the tickles became caresses, the fingers, lips.

Rabusongu

255255 views1717 comments1313 favs

.