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I fondly remember those warm, weekend evenings at twilight on the beach. After the frolic of the waves flattened, sending the surfers home and, after the last bait was spent, sending the surfcasters away, I'd set up the little, foldable, 3‘x4', rectangular stage I always…
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It was Fredrick Miller, not his murdered son Matthew, who was executed Monday night at Henshaw Prison. (the system won't take anything under 200 characters, so this part is just to take up space. please ignore)
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It is a sunny day in the autumn of the patriarch.
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My father taught me how to solder and that's when I first started to write. Now, when you hold the soldering iron in your hand and depress the trigger, the tip of the gun heats up. Novices uncoil the solder and place it on the hot tip, but that just results in it…
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Grasping for control over
social consciousness Because cigarettes are too deadly
and so is anorexia
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She is too stylish to be crazy, is what the migrant probably thinks. And he's right.
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There’s things you can change in this world and things you can’t. We have to figure out which is which. Though I never was much good at it, I guess.
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Ghosts//
and the voice of God/
never actually visited you
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The two girls who were my best friends had not minded that I didn't draw it in. It was Obie, as we called him for short, who commanded me to inhale at thirteen. "You're dead," Obie said, as soon as I did it. I fell backward in the tall, yellow grass.
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Your girlfriend with the Dresden blue eyes with the sleek belly & gorgeous scars from ripping off Avenue A dealers has you on a leash of short-term amnesia. You can't recall the last time you got off from being trigger-happy inside her & you formed a…
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Cacophony of an engine-braking eighteen-wheeler/
scatters the crows to fences, trees and wires/
in a startling chant of caw, caw, caw.
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The mandatory is not / your friend
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Early Spring, 1075, Northumbria: Judith, too ashamed to speak, too angry to cry, waves her handmaiden away. She wants no food. Wind drives icy rain across the thickness of…
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We lived on the edge of a tiny Iowa town, and picked corn fields were steps away.
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1963 15 10
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If things continue to go bad for her she will become second wife in six years.
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She sings off-key while her married lover shadow-boxes his one-dimensional and split-off selves.
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On the birthday before he started school, he received a pencil case from his paternal grandparents. The violet, oblong pouch contained a pencil and a pencil sharpener in the same color. He didn't remember what had happened with the pencil or the sharpener, but he had…
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The Nurse left work at five o’clock, walking down Dekalb Avenue toward Flatbush. He didn’t frequent the bar closest to the hospital, although he guessed other nurses and doctors from Brooklyn Hospital did. But he liked to pretend that he cared about h
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I first met death in an alley.
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Soon enough, October’s ragged/
lawn will hide its deficiencies//
under withered leaves of oak,
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He needed an editor for his Yale dissertation, the shifting borders between criminal justice and the internet. But the sex was inevitable. He was six two. I was blonde. I don’t think we liked each other very much, but that wasn’t important.
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chet baker shades my eyes
rippling through the cool water
sometimes we feed the fish
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for going forthe river and being blinded by its millionsof invisible fish, all sparklinglike pink enchanteddreams made of rosequartz and shaped like glassroses, who would? I fell for an illusionaftermy own fashion,but I could alwaysadmit mymistakes and catcha laugh out…
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If This Were Baltimore East A spray of change in the lilies and loose rubber, she pulled close to the wall. She smiled at the trucks, her handful of loot. Hallelujah, he said, converting. West Like 4 miles of cakes, they counted…
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and dreamed itself infinite.
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I wrote this during a poetry workshop at the Atlantic Center for the Arts with Carolyn Forché. January, 2015. So much more has happened since that stunning week.
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fat furry marmots who play hide and seek
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Quiet. You sit quiet as a mouse in the corner. Push a little doll around and hum la-la-la so they forget you’re there while they have the cocktail hour.
That’s how you find out they’re killing Grandma.
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There was nothing to do but dream ourselves forward. Nothing to do but not die.
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Will it//
scare us shitless when we can finally/
draw ourselves a likeness of it?
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