Authors
Poetry
Ideology, all of us inanimate in the face of the onslaught.
Poem of the Week
A rifle, empty shells, the remains of a man, a bullet through his chest.
Poem of the Week
I have heard stories of the river, how people were willing to die to cross it.
Narrative By Hand
Some people are so beautiful they belong everywhere that they go.
Story of the Week
Some people are so beautiful, they belong everywhere they go.
Poem of the Week
It is cruel, this business of exile and divorce. I will not deny it.
Narrative By Hand
My parents had seven children; some of us have bank accounts.
Fiction
There was nothing sadder than the look of defeat in a man’s eyes.
Poem of the Week
Instead, I touch: The powdered organ. The thief-shaped hole.
Poem of the Week
I see a young ZZ Top smiling, eyes darting from my shirt to my beard.
Story of the Week
Lorna was like a sculpture carved by some Greek out of marble.
Narrative Outloud
She did something few girls had ever done with him. She laughed.
Masterpieces
He wrote and rewrote endlessly, and rose at night to reread pages.
Narrative Outloud
He thought of the love that had filled the great central chamber of his life.
Narrative By Hand
You could not look at Leila for long, and yet you longed to look at her.
Narrative Outloud
You could not look at Leila for long, and yet you longed to look at her.
Narrative Outloud
You could not look at Leila for long, and yet you longed to look at her.
Story of the Week
She is complaisant with all her clothes off. She moves to his touch.
Nonfiction
Later, in a sudden about-face, she gives herself to him entirely.
Nonfiction
The wine was administered to Theo’s lips, and then the rest of us.
Interviews
What counts in the long run is pleasure in conversation with each other.
Fiction
The most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen has become the saddest.
Poetry
América, make me wings large enough to carry me back and forth.
Poem of the Week
Limbo: Latin, limbus, meaning a hem between sclera and cornea.
Poem of the Week
ConEd drills the street to dendrites, tapping morse at the old house.
Poetry
I’ve left a casement open disclosing the lording Hudson in its net of lead.
Story of the Week
He resumed his nightly practice of writing without being able to see.
Story of the Week
Grandma was forced to break her vow of silence only three times.
Story of the Week
“Come here, my good child; sing me Pergolese’s Salve Regina.
Poem of the Week
Alone but one year sober and my parole’s nearly done.
Nonfiction
I asked for water, and he shot me a look of henpecked resentment.
Poem of the Week
Sometimes one does wade into it or is ambushed as by a incensed fog.
Graphic Stories
They tried to kill us, my sisters, mother, and me; I still have the scars.
Story of the Week
The boys searched for their father, lost somewhere in the Olympic Range.
Nonfiction
“What would Toby do?” is a question that often appears in my mind.
Fiction
There’s being young and growing old, being here and being gone.
Story of the Week
Half the women around here have a husband in some kind of fix.
Narrative 10
Dr. Seuss taught me something about the way words can be used.
Poetry
Another day, I read my poems and wonder: Where is the world?
Nonfiction
He’d be buried in the town he so desperately wanted to leave.
Poem of the Week
I want my former costar Glenn Close to call me “charm personified.”
Fiction
Put yourself in bad positions, they’ll remind us. Address your weaknesses.
Story of the Week
I grew accustomed to seeing the sun rise and set from the school.
Readers' Narratives
The psychology in climbing is to look ahead, but that trick was little help.
Story of the Week
The first time we were alone, I knew it before he even told me.
Poetry
Beyond the glib off-white palisades lies the answer to an urban dream.
Narrative 10
I simply wrapped my arms around Maxey and held on for dear life.
Story of the Week
She offered her face up for what should be a brotherly kiss.
Nonfiction
Together we invented intimacy, both its benefits and its horrors.
Poem of the Week
Absence rarely makes the heart grow fonder, or so my mother said.
Story of the Week
The store was one of his last-ditch efforts to make a pile of money.
Story of the Week
With cane in hand I felt a twinge of superiority to the crutch people.
Poetry
The angel lay in his body effervescent as a flake of alabaster.
Story of the Week
Her skin was bruised under her eyes, purple like the swollen toe.
Story of the Week
The tomatoes weren’t there. She looked again at the ground.
Story of the Week
Goretti was a victim perfect for her time, an icon of Catholic sexual politics.
Fiction
Eleanor opened the door to Nick’s bedroom and felt breathless with fury.
Story of the Week
Rebecca beheld the sword which was suspended over her people.
Poem of the Week
Summer’s erosion has begun, all that taking the waves from shore.
Fiction
Sneaking was one thing, entering a bar with a someone else’s ID another.
Poetry
I want you, you captive, delivered into each other’s territories.
Poetry
I’m afraid to say anything or nothing, I’m white & unalterably broken.
Poem of the Week
I taste on my tongue a gunshot of synapses warm and light like butter
Poem of the Week
A camper fighting off a grizzly until someone can shoot it dead.
Story of the Week
You’ve seen her almost every day, going to and from the gardens.
iStories
“We’re not like other species,” you say, a novelist at night.
Story of the Week
Zeus’s tongue thrusts straight and deep between my lips.
Poem of the Week
Appearance does not really appear, but it appears to appear.
Features
It is only the failures of love that I regret, those times when I did not give myself so generously.
Poem of the Week
Oh love is stupid but it’s true, all day I feel as if I were a dog on a chain.
Poetry
The face of love is a poem I am writing in an air-conditioned room.
Story of the Week
Let’s put a frog in his bed and have him feel it jump all over him.
Poem of the Week
Take some cherry tomatoes, I say when the moon rises over the pine.
Story of the Week
What was happening? All she wants is for Teddy to fuck her silly.
Six-Word Stories
A story about what changes and what remains the same, in just six words.
Six-Word Stories
The tension between words and actions, in a six-word story.
Classics
No one’s alone. Men kill for this, or for as much. And what of the dead?
Story of the Week
“Just sex,” I say, and the old feeling is back, the creeping nausea.
Story of the Week
It’s all good,” Mila says, meaning, it’s so not, her voice glass-like.
Fiction
Sometimes these fools shoot themselves, playing with their weapons.
Poem of the Week
our minds are not the same if they were the same you would be here
Story of the Week
The boy in the woods was a secret. My secret. My first real secret.
Poem of the Week
We entertain them. We kiss and spit and strike. We’re always changing.
Narrative 10
I know now not to measure my insides against others’ outsides.
Story of the Week
The girl I was could not have imagined the woman I grew up to become.
N30B Winners
The sun falls back and vanishes like the men in my family who’ve died.
Poem of the Week
Coil of metal, coin of wood, two-headed and soft in the middle.
Poem of the Week
I take what I want, and have ever since what I want disappeared.
Poem of the Week
My relationship with god resembled that of a prisoner and firing squad.
Classics
“Some men’re like that. They have to see what they’re missing.”
Poetry
Ghosts are real. This much I know. It’s the living that give me trouble.
Poem of the Week
I did lose my dirty fingernails and ragged legs, my purpled forearms.
N30B Winners
You can always tell the military folk by their even stance, their steady gaze.
Winter Contest Winners
Had I always known this would happen? There had been no signs.
Poem of the Week
The billows murmur at our feet, where the earth and ocean meet.
Nonfiction
I’m there inside La Fonda at the bar ordering another glass of red wine!
iPoems
A field. No clouds. Tall grasses bend toward the foreground.
iPoems
A boat-tailed grackle counts the passing cars from the traffic light.
Poem of the Week
Every morning I wipe the sweat from the hollow of my master’s throat.
N30B Winners
How do you beat a man who refuses to rise from a puddle of his own blood.
Interviews
When he died earlier this year an enormous hole was left in my life.
Photography & Art
The materials were everyday and the possibilities were open-ended.
Story of the Week
Since his mother’s fall, Ali had been stopping by every week to help out.
Story of the Week
They went to pray for the dead. It was important to shed some tears.
Story of the Week
I promised to return, but secretly I dreamed of staying in America.
Story of the Week
“Look down,” I said, comb in hand. “Let me check behind your ears.”
Spring Contest Winners
Yes, Eylon thought, he lied to Cath. Lied about his day, about the risks.
Fiction
“Elohim, we lasted through all the shit of training, and now it’s over.”
Fiction
I’d chosen three hundred boys out of the best Israel had to offer.
Poetry
Some people see the man but not the light, the field but not the varnish.
iStories
I’m not here to remember a friend, but to say good-bye to a part of myself.
iStories
Thank goodness Dad died—sounds awful but he left his condo paid for.
Story of the Week
It is our first time, both of ours. This sentence ends with hate myself.
Story of the Week
The thumbnail spoke directly to the most excitable parts of himself.
iStories
The guy from the funeral home can’t get the gurney into the house.
Poetry
Cat food smells even unopened like vomit and I don’t trust cats.
Story of the Week
Mina sees, very clearly, Tony Salvatore looking up her gaping shirt.
Poem of the Week
How smooth their bones, like alabaster shaved from moonlight.
Story of the Week
The Nazis are training some of their storm-troopers here in America.
Story of the Week
When an old man marries a young piece of flesh, she is the ruler.
Classics
I uttered words I will regret to my last breath, which is already near.
Story of the Week
I was all alone in a little room, nothing but that big gun in my face.
Story of the Week
The prisoners were ten ragged scarecrows wearing prison suits.
Story of the Week
I am drawn to these victims because I was there the night they were killed.
Story of the Week
The neighbors were Ukrainians with bad tempers and owned guns.
Story of the Week
Ambition and coincidence had led me to the Royal Theatre.
Poem of the Week
It was the truth of it all—hunger’s chill, the scream beneath the surface.
Poem of the Week
Vita brevis, source of all not enough. Light leaked from stopped time.
Poetry
Kansas is a cold dessert, I say. No, Kansas is a tongue depressor, he says.
Poem of the Week
I’m the astronomer unable to lower his telescope, or look away.
Poem of the Week
It’s hard to save your own life, to take such extreme measures alone.
Poetry
For the president’s arrival they shot two dogs making love on the tarmac.
Poem of the Week
It stood across a narrow side alley where light-green ivy grew.
Story of the Week
Of course the despicable wretch would beg her to forgive him again.
Story of the Week
There was something that eluded me, that was always outside the frame.
Story of the Week
There was a time when all I wanted was go back. Ask all the questions.
Nonfiction
“We know what can happen,” Mike says. “We choose to do this.”
Story of the Week
“If a man wanted, he could be anything and not come back.”
Nonfiction
When we wake up, the five windows and the French door are full of light.
Story of the Week
By the end of my trip to St. Thomas, I had discovered a reason to live.
Narrative 10
There’s something to stepping right out of your dreams and onto the page.
Fiction
We’ve tried, but it seems it is in the stars for us to hate each other.
Fiction
He says to his boots, “Well, suppose we went for fish.”
Fiction
He tried to regain that moment of grace, but there was no conjuring it.
Poem of the Week
Hearing them coughing in the hall, you rose from your desk.
Poetry
Mostly, though, you could turn them in your hand, hold them to your nose.
Fiction
He was afraid he would be sucked into the world like this cousin had.
Fiction
The damn dog has been brainwashed. He doesn’t know
us anymore.
us anymore.
Poetry
Soon everything here will be sopped up by time. Only art will last.
Poem of the Week
He said, You have no brother. I didn’t know what he meant. I do now.
Story of the Week
He studies their mannerisms, looking for clues to the psycho spirit.
Poem of the Week
I let him record me doing it all. I wanted to watch me be a monster.
Poem of the Week
Come winter, they go to the funeral early & count the living.
Poetry
I shouldn’t have to say why the confederate flag is a symbol of hate.
Poem of the Week
You need to teach these cows to meditate. To lose their bodies.
Fiction
The laughter rises like the roar of a train as the men leap to their feet.
Story of the Week
The church was clearly the work of a madman driven crazy by the wind.
Fiction
He’s got a nice, deep kind of voice. He doesn’t sound redneck at all.
Poetry
You’re standing too close to a lit house which could be yours—is it yours?
Story of the Week
He saw the car bearing down and gave it the finger, a snarl on his face.
Story of the Week
Keaton didn’t control his emotions; he put them to use.
Story of the Week
The day was beyond the reach of words like tragic and hilarious.
Narrative on the Road
We drink to Nixon’s impeachment again, this time with the good stuff.
Story of the Week
It whispered a promise of great wealth, and I was listening.
Narrative on the Road
We skip across the surface like a stone slung by a giant travel agent.
Story of the Week
“We’d be naive,” Crump went on, “not to assume that people are vile.”
Narrative on the Road
Gresham’s law. Stupid talk chases smart talk out of circulation.
Readers' Narratives
The house is full of houseguests and they’re giving Netflix a workout.
Nonfiction
I wanted to be a citizen of the empire called American Express.
Nonfiction
Early on, Castro learned and opposed the unfairness of things.
Story of the Week
I’m in a fight for my career and the SOB won’t be there for me.
Story of the Week
When one of the Baxters yelled, “Hey, Turd,” we all turned our heads.
Poem of the Week
Left Behind climbed the Octopus Tree to find the source of fire.
Poem of the Week
This is the woman who had shrunk so small, nobody could find her.
Poem of the Week
We press closer to look at a picture: a handcuffed boy leaning toward us.
N30B Winners
It was a very strange dinner. I didn’t dare ask my parents questions.
Poetry
Let’s span a time with each other. The mutual will give us pleasure.
Poem of the Week
I want to bring the duality of us together, not spar with language.
Poem of the Week
He sits hiked up, naked to the waist, like a stone in the bedclothes.
Poem of the Week
I’m happy in the unmapped landscape inside the bottle.
Story of the Week
“I mean it, Martín. I won’t marry a man with a bald lip, like a boy.”
Story of the Week
Maybe she was a stereotype now: a single woman with a cat.
Story of the Week
When I wasn’t teaching social studies, I basically lived on my balcony.
Photography & Art
The power to alter one’s life comes from a paragraph, a lone remark.
Story of the Week
Everyone roared at her wit. Ravenous children prowled like tigers.
Fiction
The chocolate was old, dusty white, the way chocolate gets after many years.
Story of the Week
I don’t want fiction. What I want is truth. Or someone’s version of it.
Winter Contest Winners
Idzia is a little monster. For a monster, though, she’s awfully cute.
Story of the Week
My sister says, vicious as possible, “Don’t you dare try to protect me.”
Poem of the Week
Michelle dances on his forehead like an imp, like an illness in motion.
Six-Word Stories
The end of a relationship, through four six-word stories.
Fiction
“Now, just what brought you down all this way?” they wanted to know.
Fiction
We were in a play about affection. We were in a play about sex.
Nonfiction
Perhaps more than ever writers may have two kinds of fame.
Poem of the Week
Ahab went mad when he saw the sea is just the sea and nothing more.
Spring Contest Winners
Does he not see our likeness? Fursten seemed to see nothing.
Classics
I had the tongue of an adder and my heart was black with rage and hate.
Poem of the Week
Florence’s cobbled streets spoke like a broken wheel, a halfhearted
inferno.
Poem of the Week
A summer without passion, our selves pulled together like the leaves.
Poem of the Week
Christ is not alive but the she-blood is. Slow down and swerve to miss her.
Poem of the Week
I give you a real blue song the mountains hold under their foot.
Poem of the Week
I’m going to cut me some ham and wait for death to lace his boots.
Story of the Week
He bound me to blind obedience, for which I’d shown a propensity.
Story of the Week
There is hardly a rich man in the world who has not such a friend.
Narrative Outloud
We’ve seen a lot of smaller ranches bought up by outside money.
Poem of the Week
I dream a sonnet made of buttons posed stiff against its milky plastic sky.
Poem of the Week
may your harvest fit in a sack may none of your apples be sweet
Poetry
Pummel nests from limbs and drown the furred things in their dens.
Poem of the Week
The snow on the windshield a tunnel of wings my friend is driving through.
Poem of the Week
His body so close I hear the cicada hum of his cells, and he slips away.
Story of the Week
In the thickening smoke the workers clawed and flailed at one another.
Story of the Week
The proper qualities of each sex are eternally surprising to the other.
Story of the Week
The future of the book began to appear among imaginary woods.
Story of the Week
There lay before us a bag that gave forth, at a touch, the jingle of gold.
Story of the Week
These are notes that please the great heart of man.
Story of the Week
Of course she had known. Nothing in this life escaped her design.
Everywhere, people ogled the ring. Everywhere, Emeline posted pictures.
Poetry
I wanted my love to be everywhere, then love began to bite through me.
N30B Winners
I dug a hole in you; I jumped (here is the church, here is the steeple).
Poetry
He drowned under a different name, a fake name chiseled in German.
Narrative Outloud
A serious young man, I had trouble saying yes to the bright, clear days.
Poetry
Raw, glistening—god’s design. Her newborn flesh-on-the-bone.
Story of the Week
The sounds of Africa exploded around the white men and women.
Nonfiction
Nothing was permanent, no friend I made, no math test I took.
Nonfiction
Hemorrhages, it was thought, do not appear for no reason.
Narrative Outloud
I was writing copy for cheapo furniture for a crummy ad agency.
Narrative Outloud
A world of adventure awaited, a world of beautiful, available women.
Narrative Outloud
We would just roll down the old biology road like all the other suckers.
Narrative Outloud
He could not stop marveling at the velvet quality of
her skin.
her skin.
Story of the Week
Life is a dream, he thought. Something she knew and I didn’t.
Fiction
“There’s life after birth! That’s what jails and lethal injections are for!”
Features
The legendary author Robert Stone, in the words of his friends.
Narrative Outloud
The palm’s outline shimmied in the sunlight against the aqua curtain.
Fiction
The place your truest self inhabited was the place you could not bear.
Features
Our camera pans along the porch, and we see each praying woman.
Narrative By Hand
The notebooks reveal insertions, deletions, queries, and corrections.
Features
We went in search of the vividly remembered missing pages.
Fiction
“Why on earth are you taking luxury cruise passengers to Zamboanga?”
Poem of the Week
How can you love them and yet how could you live
without them?
without them?
Poem of the Week
All this while, I am eating the apple in this careless moment of life.
Poem of the Week
It was spring: the field, a botanist’s mirage of wild flowers.
Poem of the Week
The moment in your drunk when you become rich! A connoisseur.
Poetry
The signal’s too remote and there’s a delay before we can start again.
Poetry
From a pyre on the burning ghat a corpse slowly sits up in the flames.
Poem of the Week
…when you walk to the edge of the Mekong and make a wish…
Poem of the Week
Heat heat and the sky a flame of sapphire, even rocks blazing.
Poem of the Week
We spit out the black seeds, bits of night glistening on the grass.
Poem of the Week
Every day I was forced to return to the one place I did not want to be.
Love Story Contest
Interviewer said he had no intention of stealing anything from Subject.
Story of the Week
Turned out Bauer was one of the ones brought alive by misery.
Poetry
I was lying with electricity. I was already a story being told.
Story of the Week
I sometimes forget I’m a horse. I’m also a man dressed as a horse.
N30B Winners
You never see Westerners, so you don’t think of them as human beings.
Poetry
He knows what happens before it happens. Next shift, next season.
Fiction
He is too young even to be drinking let alone educating us.
Poem of the Week
Make It Big, all return and rhythm, a groove that plays to the center.
Story of the Week
It’s a girls’ college we’re going to, but all the guys know Polly’s name.
Poetry Contest Winners
It commands your presence, mocking your impatience with its steam.
Poetry
If party isn’t what we set out to do then you should go home.
Story of the Week
It never occurred to me that I was being sold too, standing inside my box.
Basil was annoyed. All that training he’d given me going to waste on art?
I’ve been selling cigarettes, I said, as if it were a credential.
Story of the Week
Someone was saying his name, and that’s how he knew he was dead.
Story of the Week
When I come to be old, I resolve not to tell the same story over and over.
Poetry
When I speak and wave my arms, it sniffs the air and watches me.
Poem of the Week
We talked. She was the same inside as I am, from the same kind.
Poem of the Week
An empty day without events. And that is why it grew immense as space.
Classics
It’s other things than the like of you would make a person afeard.
Story of the Week
“Why do we always fight,” he finally said, his voice quiet, resigned.
Narrative Outloud
She does not know within a decade she will unload a slug into her mouth.
Poem of the Week
Before we too vanish, we hike to where three trails converge.
Poem of the Week
Mistaking water hemlock for parsley, I die hours later in the hospital.
Poem of the Week
I do not expunge the past but ignite the fuse to a whistling pinwheel.
Poem of the Week
I stay gripped to pine and the sugar of existence runs through you.
Classics
Lying in wait, set to pounce on the page, are letters up to no good.
