2563 15 4
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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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1635 15 8
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Ghosts//
and the voice of God/
never actually visited you
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2416 15 9
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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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1764 15 8
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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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1491 15 7
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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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2339 15 14
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The mandatory is not / your friend
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1627 15 11
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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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1866 15 13
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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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2468 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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1412 15 7
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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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1944 15 10
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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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2064 15 3
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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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2756 15 14
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I first met death in an alley.
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1780 15 12
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Soon enough, October’s ragged/
lawn will hide its deficiencies//
under withered leaves of oak,
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2713 15 7
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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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2171 15 10
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chet baker shades my eyes
rippling through the cool water
sometimes we feed the fish
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2260 15 12
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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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2100 15 8
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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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1854 15 12
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and dreamed itself infinite.
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1869 15 14
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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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1838 15 9
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fat furry marmots who play hide and seek
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2379 15 5
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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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1980 15 11
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There was nothing to do but dream ourselves forward. Nothing to do but not die.
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1331 15 12
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Will it//
scare us shitless when we can finally/
draw ourselves a likeness of it?
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1515 15 9
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Conjure calamity and calamity comes.
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1813 15 11
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In the Ardennes for the the first time...
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1769 15 5
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"when I say bag, what I mean to say is…"
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1137 15 5
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The trio stuffed their grilling equipment in a battered van and left for Dixieland Speedway at 4:30 am.
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2141 15 3
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He stopped the shower and recounted his life, now Kin-less and plain.
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2429 15 7
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“Black is up, red is down,” I said, knowing he turned to pleasant memories of lawbreaking when he felt discouraged. I asked him to meet me for coffee. He said he hadn’t bought a coffee in a year.
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