Explore

Eleanor opened the door to Nick’s bedroom and felt breathless with fury.

I’m the astronomer unable to lower his telescope, or look away.

I offer you these outs, and it stings when you take me up on them.

Each evening spent guessing which hemisphere the moon might wreck.

I am struck by the otherness of things rather than their sameness.

He sobbed; he said he would go to therapy, stop drinking.

“We know what can happen,” Mike says. “We choose to do this.”

They felt smarter and sexier, especially when together.

A suitcase of the body slapped with stickers of scars from every location.

The orderlies see him in the mirror and mistake it for his twin.

“I love you” is always a quotation. You did not say it first.

Over the air conditioner, she hears, unmistakable, the bleating of a siren.

let me fall through some small bore into your tiny breathing eden

Don’t send me home without a round of applause if not a title.

A woman from the next table eyed him and he eyed her right back.

Lovers, a new set of six-word stories from Elizabeth Benedict.

Something has to be what this is, old and primitive, and it sounds like this.

She was bad. A cool bad. All third-graders wanted bad like hers.

We drove, talking fast, fast, fast. He was always going for my zipper.

She stopped, turned toward him, placed her hand on his chest.

Lynn Freed reads from her collection, The Curse of the Appropriate Man.

I arrived that evening barefoot and swathed in a sort of striped toga.

Their leader is a badly wounded boy in need of wounding others.

Time is changing. November 1. Clocks back one hour. New season.

You move rocks, run water, check the path of mouse and rabbit.

A man and a woman joined by newspaper pages culture to politics.

To keep the baby safe, we sealed the house as if against bad weather.

We’re phosphorus, we’re this glowing rock under UV light in the mineral shed.

I confessed to loving another man, streetlamp sequin on a rain puddle. Later, in sleep, your arms opened to me. Mid-snore compromise.

People assume married cartoonists are laughing all the time.