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THE CHAINS THAT KEEP

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I usually idle by Spades Check Cashing on 8th Ave. and catch folks that way. The Homestead cops, they moved stations from a little up Amity to down on 7th, which is closer to Spades, but they leave me alone. I've drove jitneys almost ten years. Only been cited twice,…

As Luck Would Have It

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For fifteen years Wendy waited for Harry to leave his wife. From time to time, there’d been ultimatums, break-ups too, but they never stuck. Now Wendy’s luck was about to change. It was Tuesday, Wendy and Harry’s standing night to be together. His wif

ROLLING LIKE THUNDER

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The ocean smelled like decomposed plant life and clinically despicable vagina, but I still spoke of its power and my fear of it in moonlit clichés and she still listened.

a day uptown/a night on the bowery

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in her monestary mission, with her rosary and candles, time holds me here my feet got the travelin' blues but my hands tie old women's bones to my hair

Chemistry (Valentine's Day Massacre)

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Whenever we’re carressin’, I find you quite engrossin’, I’m filled with vasopressin endorphins and oxytocin.

The Nude Pianist: A Novel: Chapter 1

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Before he was Francesco Martinelli

A One-eyed Polar Bear Tap-dancing On A Polaroid Of Satan Dressed As Gandhi

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The Concord of This Discord

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-Love is a rushing of blood

Black House

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I dreamt once a child’s drawing of a house all scribbly black crayon swayback roof crooked chimney. God, do you remember how cold it was that night?

Year End Closeout: Buy One, Get Seven Free.

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It’s not that cold but the cold that is/ penetrates layered cloth and soft skin/ to chill the blood in its capillaries

Lint Trick

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Those socks? Nope. I'd look like the joker in the commercial, the creep with the pollen issues and the triangular smile. What a genius. It's the part off-screen I can't forget, the part they left on the editing reel. She's crumbling the crackers into her soup, that dry…

There is a woman

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There is

Weltschmerz

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I clearly see the squirrels of negativity all around me or at least I sense that they are there, filling in the blank spaces as I read down the page prior to arriving at the meaning of everything. The greenness of figs before they

Sara and the Machines of Loving Grace

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I, like Sara, am the last of my kind still activated. I am a Machine of Loving Grace.

1 Mil = One-Tenth of a Cent

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Thankfully I don't have to share my Jim Beam with the cat.

Passings

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Perhaps my grandparents, Fred and Lela, when they were growing up....

By the Time the Oceans Rise

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By the time the oceans rise/ enough for Kansans to care about,

What Literary Rejection Letters Would Mean In The Real World

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I ask for your patience with this form message, as it is part of a system that ensures every submissive ex lover is considered separately, since I am involved in a lot of anonymous sex.

The Obsession of Bentley Squeamish

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The thing Bentley remembered most about her was she had no body odor. None.

Warning: Literary Fiction: The One-Dollar Minister

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It was Warren who introduced me to this bouncer fellow named John O’Toole. Warren met O’Toole and his wife, Angelina, through the dark prison poet Eugene Forcer. Forcer and O’Toole were the best of friends until a riff erupted between them one drunken n

First Law Blues

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Energy is constant though it may manifest/ as dust motes atop the housing of your monitor/ and in the fibers of the filter of your fan coil unit

My Dad Builds the House

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Before the saw came my fist through the wall. Now I kneel on the crumbled drywall in my son's closet holding a flashlight, peering into the hole at the plumbing parts I'm supposed to replace. On the other side of the wall the bathtub faucet drips. It is my second…

Refugees

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Four in the morning. I was awake because I'm always awake. There were little fog-halos around the streetlights.

I Have a Hard Time Having a Good Time

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At the third or fourth discotheque I drink so much I accidentally find myself happy.

In Portland, Where It Rains

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So many opportunities for mud can be found in these hills,

Sugar Cookie Season

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take out the yellowed recipes/ left by mothers and grandmothers—// perhaps the great aunt who never married—

Journal of Puritan Minister, Jon Sorrim: Fragment 1

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It was the first time I had ever seen a possession.

When Borders was Alive and Well

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I'd been working for two years as a barista in a Starbuck's in a giant, two-story Borders in an upscale mall on Rt. 355, a main artery between Washington D.C., and Frederick, Maryland. I'd finished my M.F.A in 2000 and was trying to build up steam for more grad…

Other Rooms and Other Houses

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Your self-effacement hid/ so much of you// until you died and the full/ inked legacy shown in light

Bare Feet

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Bare feet on hardwood floor Twists into circles