Authors
Readers' Narratives
What better place to write the great American novel than North Africa?
Poetry
It was only a matter of time before the damp of loss grew within us like moss.
Story of the Week
I never actually existed. I didn’t know it at the time, but it’s clear as day.
Story of the Week
Their marriage had dwindled to a separation and a running joke.
Story of the Week
I wish I could tell him he’s not going to hell. It would be so freeing for him.
Poem of the Week
I couldn’t make sense of the ruined house, the love stained to its creases.
Sometimes life is a sequence of departures, sometimes a destruction.
iPoems
My father was neither kind nor strong in his bruising.
Spring Contest Winners
Keely finally stops crying when they step outside. The shock of cold.
Poem of the Week
I have a maple in the yard and from time to time all is distant.
Fiction
I’m alive, Sarah thinks, the slam of his look going all the way in.
Story of the Week
I wanted to tear away at the fabric of my pants, dig open my skin.
Story of the Week
All of those feelings—you do not have them, they have you.
Poem of the Week
You live in this country, you put up bars, you train your dogs to snarl.
Poetry
No one tells you what it sounds like out in the streets when bullets clang.
Story of the Week
The fish’s eye is mangled, tugged inward; blood leaks from its gills.
Poetry
We roasted mastodons. Designed skewers, ovens, steampits.
Poetry
There’s no need to check for a pulse, hold a hand mirror for breath.
Poem of the Week
Men can’t sense like that. Or won’t. Even a father don’t dare get that close.
Poetry
The irreversible ink stain breaking the face of whatever we skate on.
Photography & Art
We imagined the train routes through the heart of the country.
Spring Contest Winners
I returned to research a history we’d only known through stories.
Spring Contest Winners
“In a way, it’s your fault,” he says, handing us a bag of frozen peas.
Story of the Week
He’ll probably try to get her in the sack, just to stay in practice.
Poetry Contest Winners
Your jumps are numbered. It is better to be a bird without altitude.
iPoems
Just sugar cubes and a crop for you. Salt licks to smart the tongue.
Narrative Outloud
Better to be a bird
without altitude.
Or to get out of the game early.
Narrative Outloud
I was once a rider of mastodons, a waitress showing skin.
iPoems
I want to be rapt around your linger, not Thumbelina under your dumb.
Story of the Week
I hate it here, but I’ll make the best of it, because that’s what mothers do.
Poem of the Week
In that great darkness could I explain anything, anything at all.
Poem of the Week
The ego with which we began filters away as love accumulates below.
Poem of the Week
Welcome, little citizen. Lend me your presence, and I’ll lend you mine.
Poem of the Week
Suddenly two would dart and clasp one another belly to belly.
Poetry
I have never seen a bird, but I tell stories of creatures that walk the sky.
Poetry
All her sisters have gone to bed, dreaming dreams not like the wakeful.
Nonfiction
Mentors can suggest to you what more you are capable of.
Poetry
Nothing stills, nothing stops. The world is still as it was before.
Story of the Week
At nineteen I lived for three months as an earnest cocaine addict.
Classics
In that instant, Niel lost one of the most beautiful things in his life.
Story of the Week
It takes a strong woman to make any sort of success in the West.
Story of the Week
I must never go to the garden without a heavy stick or a corn-knife.
Story of the Week
That, indeed, is very nearly the whole of the higher artistic process.
Story of the Week
If he could not evade a serious question by a joke, he bolted.
Classics, Story of the Week
Amusement is one thing; enjoyment of art is another.
Photography & Art
Merwin discovered and restored eighteen acres of abandoned land.
Winter Contest Winners
Her mother singing out the window at trucks slamming the other way.
Poem of the Week
As a shadow I arouse you will you believe the truth of my mouth.
Poetry
I want to sleep in a bed next to a man who won’t dream of me all night.
Story of the Week
Her lips had the scent of the first kiss, and a thirst for justice.
Poem of the Week
They dust off facts like diamonds that excel in perfection under a monocle.
Poetry
Whitman may just mean: it is pretty cold, but there’s always colder.
Poetry
Below, the kiss silently maneuvers our bodies closer to the rose bed.
Poetry
The itch of hay dust was the unscratchable itch of desire.
Nonfiction
I came to computers while trying to run away from literature.
Narrative 10
A friend of my father’s once told me, “You’ll never be a writer.”
Poem of the Week
You are the only one who knows not to pour water on the flame.
Features
In the best fiction, there exists a palpable sense of discovery.
Poem of the Week
Barbie Chang asks why the evil one always has black hair.
Poetry
Some days Barbie Chang wants to hang up her Asian boots.
Poem of the Week
My children, children, remember to let me go, delete my number.
Poetry
Death is our common ancestor. It doesn’t care who we have dined with.
Poem of the Week
The Village wasn’t really a village. No walnut trees. Just cut flowers.
Poem of the Week
I’ll leave a trail of crumbs as I descend into god knows where.
Poem of the Week
Sometimes you weren’t a good daughter, the mother says.
Story of the Week
She was the idiot who fell in love with some high-class gigolo.
Winter Contest Winners
To be married is to learn to love, captive in your own new country.
Nonfiction
Identify where you came from, where you are, and where you wish to go.
Photography & Art
“If the world is becoming a void, the artist must fill it with his soul.”
N30B Winners
What is greater: the distance between these bodies, or their need?
Poetry Contest Winners
I watched to see how the others lived, not knowing I was the Other.
Poetry Contest Winners
Standing there in our small shadows, we discuss the ways of the dead.
Poem of the Week
When I saw her, I was witness and weapon both, charging at her.
Poetry
I bled. God didn’t want to hear about it. He said unclean and so it was.
Poetry Contest Winners
I am determined to praise my particular world, so I must praise you.
Fiction
It was the day I told a lie that would embarrass me for years to come.
Classics
He always talked of making money with the air of a connoisseur.
Fiction
Hearing the baby’s cry, Varka finds the enemy who is crushing her heart.
Classics
Gurov reflected, “it wouldn’t be a bad idea to make her acquaintance.”
Poem of the Week
You have to be three times better than the white kids, at everything.
Poetry
Just give me a small joy, say, the size of a ketchup packet.
Poem of the Week
home is his hands, our bowls, so many gay fridge magnets.
Story of the Week
Did you hear about the candidate who grabbed Hugh’s dick?
Story of the Week
“I want to stay in real yurts,” I said, “not yurts for Westerners.”
Story of the Week
It suddenly seemed to her that the world was filled with little miracles.
There were moments when love overcame her despair.
Poetry
I love it—watching gray light bleed out over the makeshift bed on the floor.
Poem of the Week
It is the night of whores and monsters, but without the killings.
Story of the Week
His chest was sweaty and his T-shirt stuck to it, bleeding black.
Story of the Week
“Ki-Tae the famous pastor,” Jae says to her. “Can you believe life.”
Fiction
He thinks with joy and conviction that the Japanese are his enemy.
Story of the Week
There would be no one to live for; she would live for herself.
Fiction
For the first time in her life she stood naked in the open air.
Story of the Week
“Tell me that everything will be okay,” I whispered to the photo.
Poem of the Week
Many people remarked upon the similarities between the flags.
Poetry
No one was awake and I was hungover young as clean as a piano.
Poetry
At 35,000 feet, the center of heaven, in the deep Milky Way, we meet.
Story of the Week
I was free. The first step had been taken, and it was irrevocable.
Poem of the Week
The hawk moves out of the way to let a little hot package of breath rise up.
Poetry
I love scientists. They’re trying their hardest. And they just want love.
N30B Winners
Something basks and gathers in the dark parts of an open ear.
iPoems
Salt lick inquest skill-step stalks. All flit, vanish: footfall’s fault.
Poetry
I slept but never dreamed there. Nor did I feel the need to court a god.
Poem of the Week
The flail is raised high, back bent in echo of the boys’ backs.
Poem of the Week
our hands are full of those women tricked or transformed.
Story of the Week
“I can’t hold it any longer. I have to pee,” I finally confessed to Viola.
Poem of the Week
She is a stalk, exhausted. She will surround these bones with flesh.
Poem of the Week
And jesse, the smart bombs do not recognize the babies.
Poem of the Week
won’t you celebrate with me that every day has tried to kill me
N30B Winners
When he kisses me, my heart flutters in my chest like swarming bees.
iPoems
Three lives I flicked alight with a few match scrapes. I cupped them.
Poetry
She wears her nakedness like it has been woven from air.
Poem of the Week
She takes her hand to my scalp: eyes close as if tasting lemon cake.
N30B Winners
Elsewhere, perhaps here too, regimes stagger, a congress ends.
Nonfiction
The sex in these fantasies was always a product of love.
Story of the Week
My country neither interested me nor inspired any sense of fealty.
Story of the Week
Heaven preserve me from the Epidemic of a Proud Ignorance!
Poem of the Week
My husband shovels snow from flower beds back onto the drive.
Story of the Week
We were young and lived wild lives in the delightful city of our sojourn.
Fiction
He will, no doubt, be out of this house soon, headed over to Montgomery.
Poetry
Forgive me, please, for continuing to believe that roses are beautiful.
Story of the Week
Why does she do it? She knows cutting yourself is a joke. Goth, idiotic.
Readers' Narratives
Summer days were magical and almost seemed to last forever.
Story of the Week
She favoured me with an even more viciously scornful “Don’t care!”
Story of the Week
“O youth! The strength of it, the faith of it, the imagination of it!”
Story of the Week
It is natural that the novelist should doubt his ability to cope with his task.
Classics
Her knees seemed about to give way, and he quickly grabbed her elbow.
Interviews
I used bravado to protect myself when we lived in poverty.
Nonfiction
He begins to realize that the impossible event may well be about to occur.
Poem of the Week
Once upon a time, a couple wandered in a glass forest, hand in hand.
iPoems
To keep the baby safe, we sealed the house as if against bad weather.
iPoems
We’re phosphorus, we’re this glowing rock under UV light in the mineral shed.
iStories
All we knew from my father was that my sister had to be cut from her car.
Poem of the Week
Centrifugal force circled the beasts until they swirled airborne.
Fiction
He picked up a fairy disguised as a go-go dancer and brought her home.
What right does an American mutt like me have to depict in fiction the lives of a Salvadoran family?
Narrative 10
I’ve found that love has provided my life’s happiest moments.
Story of the Week
Throwing the El Camino into drive, he roared down the mountain road.
Story of the Week
Ah, yes, Rita reminded herself: I won. Her Mistress of Mayhem award.
Fiction
The sense of power that flights of temper evoke will betray you.
Poetry
Ink to paper, she is inventory, has a price tag. A piece to catalog.
Nonfiction
This is a novel that contains more than its actuarial share of falls.
Spring Contest Winners
She must know she was a mistake, what they call now a surprise.
Story of the Week
I push the stroller across the courts to the scene of the thing I don’t get.
Poetry
Please look away from Mars dangling so angry in so much darkness.
Poem of the Week
Close mist around window. I attempt gender. Deposit each letter.
Story of the Week
Live Dangerously! If you get hurt, the suffering will bring a new being.
Poetry
Some goals: stop buying jeans. Stop being angry at mom/dad/sister.
Story of the Week
All that existed was Louisa’s beauty—or Khin’s refashioning of it.
Nonfiction
The human heart is far more intricate than any single term can describe.
Classics
“I suppose there have been a good many men killed in this room.”
Narrative Taste
I read cookbooks the way I do poetry, with a willingness to be transported.
Narrative Taste
Chocolate promises a happy ending. I believed in that promise.
Narrative Taste
This would not be a wooing meal. I was cooking my man into submission.
Nonfiction
I grip the handlebar and pin my eyes shut, waiting for the inevitable crash.
Poem of the Week
Like steps of passing ghosts, the leaves break from the trees.
N30B Winners
The end’s already in motion, the end was starting this whole time.
Poem of the Week
Francis too had his time in the wilderness, lost in the mountains.
Poetry Contest Winners
In Astoria, Leo and I find a small church on our way to the river.
Poetry
How many gods do you believe in?
How many good men?
Fiction
For a moment I had the delicious feeling of fitting in without even trying.
Features
Our culture cherishes a fantasy of a certain writerly existence.
Profiles
We have mysterious inclinations. No one can explain it to us.
Nonfiction
I would chase it to the shores of the lake where the killer waited.
Narrative 10
“Nobody asked you to write.” Over time, I realized it was a magic key.
Story of the Week
You slouched on the couch, naked, in front of the air conditioner.
Fiction
No matter how hard I played, it was like I was performing inside a vacuum.
iStories
Rules are rules. No one comes this close, this fast. Protocol reigns.
Story of the Week
“Maybe you should leave the rumba to those who know how to do it.”
Fiction
The future was spread out for us to go in any direction we wanted.
iStories
Later in the pale of dawn your hair brushed across my forearm.
Fiction
In school, he was called gook, chink, and one boy called him ching-chong.
Fiction
Since the accident she lost her hold on the world and never got it back.
Fiction
It’s a mistake to be here, he thinks, but he doesn’t turn around.
Fiction
A woman from the next table eyed him and he eyed her right back.
Fiction
He had dreamed of being a front-runner, someone who changed lives.
Nonfiction
My wife had time to form a thought: I have killed my daughter.
Story of the Week
I’ve got other plans. And they don’t center on ringnecks.
Fiction
He is not in the position to lose a friend. Not when one is all he has.
Poem of the Week
Everything comes down to the lightning. Nothing is ever by chance.
Nonfiction
Logic is such an elegant weapon; and religion, such an easy target.
Nonfiction
I want to dispute that depression is by definition pathological.
Nonfiction
In the street waiting for a cab, Ann’s boyfriend entrusted me with the story.
Nonfiction
How many times had I passed it in a taxicab or walked within sight of it?
Nonfiction
The boat’s one of the most flagrant symbols capitalism ever spawned.
Nonfiction
Any society that fails to protect its children is in terminal decline.
Story of the Week
The baby in her belly is not a sibling, will never be their playmate.
Classics
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens her first rose
Story of the Week
When the thugs from the bank showed, up my father laughed.
Fiction
“You look like you’re about to fall over,” he says. “Are you all right?”
Poem of the Week
Each time he retells that morning my dad forgets I was there too.
Poem of the Week
The people awakened, rose up, raged at tyrants garbed in uniforms.
