Authors
Story of the Week
I looked up from the cave floor to see a guy pointing a handgun at us.
Story of the Week
I had never thought of bed before as anything but an innocent place.
Story of the Week
Emil was busy applying his anger therapy, and it was working.
Fall Contest Winners
I became a realist the moment they tied a brick to my balls.
Poetry
I know about sex. It’s not a cardinal flying into the wrong window.
Poem of the Week
I ought to haul out this junk I called winter and lose it somewhere.
Poem of the Week
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very Heaven!
Poetry
My love swims you, your shoulders like hard sails under the green curls.
Poem of the Week
A branch breaks and the body lands the wrong way. Snapping is easy.
One-Act Plays
We enjoyed the infidelity. A great deal more than they seemed to.
Narrative Outloud
Let us stifle under mud and affirm it is fitting and delicious to lose everything.
Nonfiction
The sloshed grownups had little to say to me. I loved it that I was alien.
Interviews
I didn’t know I would be any good. But I knew I wanted to be a poet.
Interviews - Audio/Video
Poets need to be
in constant touch with the extremes of feeling.
in constant touch with the extremes of feeling.
Narrative Outloud
I don’t know if I’ve written anything without changing the details.
Narrative Outloud
A woman’s long bare legs stretched up at the edge of the graveyard.
Story of the Week
Like an idiot, I was flattered at first to get honorary degrees.
Narrative Outloud
The Poet Laureate reads three poems in his New Hampshire home.
Story of the Week
For Henry Moore there is not only the best day but the worst.
Narrative Outloud
All day we lay on the bed, my hand stroking the deep gold of your thighs.
Nonfiction
At nineteen you were six-foot-two. At ninety-one you will be two-foot-six.
Narrative Outloud
He would write a poem on one page, but it might take him months.
Narrative Outloud
The rhythm and sound is in there to start, and it seems to lead the way.
Poem of the Week
Near to closing, he’d flop down in the chair to count his moldy money.
Story of the Week
Of the sixteen elephants, one—a lady—completely took my heart.
Poem of the Week
Her girlish hand the color of rich vanilla floating over the flotsam.
Story of the Week
As soon as I heard his voice, I felt as if a wind had swept through my head.
iPoems
Those under us are not dead. They are dancers. We are the music.
Poetry
In hushed awe they talk of things to come, a golden time of flowering.
Poem of the Week
I am wet with circuitry. And I doubt I could ever save anyone.
Story of the Week
Son, do you know of shame? Then you must know that I cannot feel it.
Story of the Week
I was getting a little fogged, but I recognized irony when I heard it.
Fiction
Sister Barbara folded her arms like a forbearing husband.
Poetry
The body passing through its own fires, the hard escape of it all.
First & Second Looks
“One of the most objectionable books in any language whatsoever.”
Classics
A grin of bitterness swept thereby like an ominous bird a-wing.
Poem of the Week
When the light failed she listed all the places he might find her.
Poetry
Even as a child, I was skeptical—testing God when He wasn’t looking.
Poetry
My mother stands at the doorway, her broad face turned to the earth.
Poem of the Week
They’re still there since they never grew old. The story is never finished.
Poetry
Arriving on earth’s paradise, wearing only light for their bodies.
Narrative High School Writing Contest
Women should hate it when people whistle at their backs as they walk past.
Poetry
These natives have the smiles we haven’t seen since we were children.
Poem of the Week
…a classmate dropped dead, his heart was attacked at thirty-three.
Poetry
The pen is mightier than the sword in the fretwork of a poet’s language.
Poetry
All my life I have noted that my thinking was atavistic, totemic.
Poem of the Week
Life has never been in remission or rehabilitation. Life doesn’t sing.
Poem of the Week
Rumi advised me to keep my spirit up in the branches of a tree.
Poetry
The urge to be a tiny bird upon a tiny limb, maybe a bridled titmouse.
Poetry
I have studied and become intimate with the speed of darkness.
Poem of the Week
I was nineteen and mentally infirm when I saw the prophet Isaiah.
Poem of the Week
I am tamping down the earth with the flat side of a blade I am burying you
Story of the Week
The pictures were taken in the woods, naked from the waist down.
iPoems
Her trust in me is a swirled marble sinking slowly in an aqua pool.
Poem of the Week
The keys look like Tommy’s teeth once he began to appreciate meth.
Poetry
At the memorial service, I could barely hear the student read.
Nonfiction
She looked at him with sorrow, and surprise, despite all the news.
Nonfiction
Neither blood nor belonging accounted for my presence in Ghana.
Fiction
We are like a village here, separated from the rest of the world.
Fiction
The child is too perfect to be human; too perfect, truthfully, to exist.
Story of the Week
If it were me, kid, I’d swallow. You bet I would. But first I’d run like hell.
Story of the Week
Welcome, the place seemed to say, let’s screw with you a little more.
Story of the Week
You can’t ask her not to fall in love when she does it on a daily basis.
Story of the Week
Not every fate was alike. Not everyone ended up paired off in love.
Narrative 10
Art doesn’t conform to a capitalist’s ratio of productivity to time.
Poem of the Week
You’ve gathered more knowledge than you’d need for nine lives.
Poem of the Week
You’re supposed to hit is the bull’s-eye, that black spot, precise spot.
Fall Contest Winners
I commute to war five days a week in a station wagon the color of an egg.
Winter Contest Winners
You think I couldn’t write it because I look like a mechanic, I said.
Fiction
“I’m in a Soviet tank in Siberia and I need to know if you know Nina Bowyer.”
Story of the Week
A bird is chirping outside, the world is carrying on, and she is in it.
Story of the Week
The bank had stated that emphatically. They had to sell and sell now.
It was as if Hank had aged twice as fast, and he couldn’t stand that truth.
Poetry
Wicked fictions wrap a young tongue’s sweet-tipped fibs into fact.
Story of the Week
Of late a graduate student named Cassius has joined our ranks.
Story of the Week
“I have always had a gift of feeling what is in other people’s hearts.”
Narrative Outloud
An excerpt of The Transit of Venus, read by actor Juliet Stevenson.
Story of the Week
Susan Ann so wants to be that girl—daring, free, divinely sensual.
Poetry
Everything hung in perfect balance. Light and dark, heaven and hell.
iPoems
In the garden this morning, I thought for a moment I saw T’ao Ch’ien.
iPoems
And both of them standing there in late afternoon light, looking back.
Poem of the Week
Blame the juncos outside. Sopranos in one tree, altos in another.
Poem of the Week
Subtract for the cigarettes, the bourbon, the sleepless nights.
First & Second Looks
Within two weeks, his parents found out and forbade him to belong.
Story of the Week
Apparently this was something he had to tell her with his clothes on.
Fiction
It’s hard to say why Marlee wears the bridesmaid’s dress to work today.
Short Shorts
So, Ida, are you a Jew or a nudist? Do you believe in Hanukkah?
Poem of the Week
We wondered at their habits and gave them little poems for names.
Poetry
This box is full of wires, energy that moves in ways I can hardly fathom.
N30B Winners
The smell of you, muscadine and peat, the bleached salt of semen.
Poem of the Week
I want everything to mean. To have worth and weight. But it doesn’t.
Poem of the Week
I am struck by the otherness of things rather than their sameness.
Story of the Week
It is the one day that is purely American. Yes, a day of celebration.
Poetry
Flesh is temporary, memory a tilting barn dismantled nail by nail.
Poem of the Week
All those butterflies I impaled when I was a boy—will I go to hell for that?
Story of the Week
I know quite well that I’m still a beginner and have a long way to go.
Story of the Week
My friend Angela, who is also my roommate, got me into stripping.
Poem of the Week
Someone says Jesus is bread. He is also suffering. He is like the Internet.
Poetry Contest Winners
There’s no studying for this. I think souls must exist in wanted things.
Poem of the Week
I’m guilty—locating my gratitude against someone else’s suffering.
Poem of the Week
I would slip the hook under the sow’s chin, hold my breath, and pull.
Poetry
An idea surfacing—a crack of orange teeth. As if a ceiling disappears.
Poem of the Week
For one hundred years I followed old people to learn what I was in for.
Poetry
In my head at least, you thrive, you die in this mix of ghost and gone.
Poem of the Week
I don’t know you, I only think of you to ignore how unhappy I am.
Poem of the Week
Poetry isn’t work, he said, unless you’re talking about reading it.
Poem of the Week
I wore the rose pants for weeks without telling anyone.
Poem of the Week
I am the king of doing wheelies on the Stingray bicycle of my mind.
Poem of the Week
The next time we made love, I looked for the fox looking down at me.
Poetry
What if white men became supremely good at making up for our past?
Poem of the Week
I tried to cheer my brother up by reminding him all clowns die too.
Poetry
I was a skinhead in look and seem, a balding guy trying out the future.
Poem of the Week
Weird that yellow’s the color of cowardice when the sun never runs.
Story of the Week
There was a dry snap inside the door of the safe. “There it is.”
Narrative Outloud
The people with pebbles go home to frolic under the detritus of the day.
Poem of the Week
Now we have the shells, the casings, emptied and scattered, strewn
N30B Winners
Paharganj reels with beggars. Old women, boys, breast-feeding girls.
Poetry
Love isn’t the same as happiness. Some poet probably said that.
Poetry
Don’t hitchhike the Mediterranean coast of Algeria in the summer of ’71.
Poem of the Week
When you write the story of being a father don’t leave out the joy.
Poem of the Week
Your friends are sniffing glue from a paper bag in the back of an Impala.
Poem of the Week
I feel delicious tody! I can claim the whole lawn with just one flamingo.
Short Shorts
Our house sits alone out in the country, seven miles north of town.
Poem of the Week
That summer we moved to the house you would die in years later.
Fiction
She was no man’s dark dream, only a girl forced to swim half-clothed.
Poem of the Week
All afternoon it rains on the traffic outside my window. It’s nothing new.
Poetry
We watched our father chuck her boom box out the bedroom window.
Poem of the Week
Anything can happen because everything happens in New York.
Poetry
I will leave the pills in their bottles, I will leave the bottles by my bed.
Poem of the Week
I found a lodestone & I went to the creek & I buried it in the creek bed
Poem of the Week
Whales are very big (I saw one on a beach once) but trash is way bigger.
Fall Contest Winners
I found myself wondering what her life had been in her widowhood.
Poetry
That is a building. That is a tree. That is a yellow car. That is a curb.
Poetry
Everything changed. And to our greater shame, nothing did.
Poetry
I could page the women’s voices in their velvet bags bound with string.
Poetry
I tell him: junkies are the only people worth talking to about love.
Story of the Week
Three fingers had been cut from her right hand, two from her left.
Fiction
My husband screws around. Not much and not often, but I know.
Fiction
If there was any magic in his sad life, it happened on that day.
Fiction
When the coach called again, Wayne felt his temper slipping.
Story of the Week
Trailblazers we celebrate. Those outcasts, outliers, and outlaws.
Fiction
“With me for an uncle you don’t never need to be afraid of him, baby.”
Story of the Week
Even if he lost her he would never disparage her, never not love her.
Story of the Week
Now, with new orders to carry out, he’d been restored to factory settings.
Story of the Week
Clark and Robertson got a reset, and Tuyen would get a baby. But Mikey?
Story of the Week
L’chaim. To lives both bygone and ongoing, and to the truths I choose to believe.
Winter Contest Winners
He will be unable to resist his manias for symmetry and completion.
Narrative 10
How does he do it? I’ve been trying to figure this out for the past decade.
Narrative Outloud
That day he stood on some threshold and paused and wept at his choice.
Readers' Narratives
It is not surprising that her solo marathon did not turn out as planned.
Fiction
He’s clear about his wishes: to die in this house, in his own bed.
Story of the Week
Tony’d had guns pulled on him more times than he had toes.
Story of the Week
She weighed the cold shiny gun on her palm and let out a jagged breath.
Fiction
If I had been blessed that afternoon, why did I lose my tongue?
Story of the Week
I’m on the verge of a breakdown. So I might as well have another child.
Story of the Week
What’s wrong with easy? I mean, who wants sex to be hard work?
Story of the Week
“Get the hell off my car,” she yelled, and the kids scattered like fish.
Story of the Week
He was tall too—that was part of the impression of big, of lots, of plenty.
Classics
The danger with a young contributor is that he may be his own rival.
Classics
I put out my lips, and we kissed through the newly painted fence.
Poem of the Week
They say the night watchman is so good he hears the grass growing.
Poem of the Week
You are afraid pain itself might develop a way to communicate.
Poem of the Week
Some portion of love is braided from lying, from the names of distance.
Story of the Week
For all the stories they’d concocted, the real one electrified them.
Narrative 10
Love enlarges. What you put out into the world, you get back tenfold.
Poem of the Week
I hear pleasure ringing, and I wonder what led us to this moment.
Poem of the Week
You didn’t speak, your eyes lobbed incendiary shells over the harbor.
Poem of the Week
There are the short and decisive words: yes, no, now, never, love, death, poetry.
Poem of the Week
Fumbling among the constellations, I believed my throat would burst.
Poetry
There was a special kind of power in playing the father of God.
Poem of the Week
Any good river should be fat, any good ocean should be worth meeting.
A child won a hundred dollars by taking it from the tail of a muddy calf.
I remember Robinhood too, but that feels like a different thing.
Classics
One said she heard the jazz-band sob when the little dawn was grey.
Poetry
This comb smells like tea gone cold, weighs less than a vein pumped full.
Nonfiction
We want to revisit what life was like before technology infected us.
Fiction
Frank kept his face blank as he read the orders: Report to Berlin.
Poem of the Week
The towns died as quickly as a single house, a house like ours, lit gold within.
Poetry
Thus is the way of leaves the secret ones that no one sees, not even me
Nonfiction
X wants, but Y gets in the way: the equation of desire and obstacle.
Poem of the Week
The hands opened calmly like seeds, endured the passage of time.
Fall Contest Winners
I saw my mother’s face turn dark like the winter sky before a storm.
Poem of the Week
Never mind the gossip of the world. Don’t have it, yet have it!
Poem of the Week
I lift my wine flask, drunk with rivers and hills.
Poetry
I’m always driving through the desert, on the interstate’s black river.
First & Second Looks
I was called upon to set my will against my father, the village custom.
Story of the Week
Thus John Redding grew to manhood, playing, studying and dreaming.
Poetry
He greets you with a kiss and marries your elbow to walk the path.
Story of the Week
People didn’t end marriages without warning, without second chances.
