1658 13 7
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1919 13 8
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The clickity-click of poker chips spills out to the six of us waiting for a table. We're old college buddies, drunk since one this afternoon, sporting the ball caps our wives never let us wear. We brag. About our poker wins, how easy it is to read each other, how we can…
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1346 13 4
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Jane says to Roy, “What are you doing, Roy?”“Fuck off, Jane, I'm reading,” says Roy.“Well you could have just said so.”“I did.”“I mean just without—”“Yeah, well fuck off anyway.”“I've had…
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1818 13 9
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You generated coal light from your gait as easily as the new sun crawls through a sleepy forest, without worry over hot spillage, or who might be horribly blinded or grossly revealed or given visions in that rare moment of wet earth and…
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1490 13 8
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Steel beams. Welds painted over green. Yellow numbers of some sort. Old phone booths. Tags on the walls. I looked up and saw where bits of water fall down from the overpass. Pigeon up there. Washing his wings or something like that. Greyness. I was in a truck.…
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1280 13 8
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I worry for the daffodils/
and there optimistic yellow bursts./
I worry for the over-eager clover,//
prodigious green on crepe myrtles,/
even for the early green of nut grass.
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1161 13 9
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The line weights are spot on/
and the snap of lines is textbook/
for a discipline that died with AutoCad
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1110 13 10
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Tentacles hold fast to the small/
thrashing thing they believe is true//
which, devoured, once crushed/
completely still, turns into shit,
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1278 13 10
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There was something about his eyes that seemed more sly than happy. He looked like a teamster winking at a mayor who’d just paid him off to keep trucks rolling through Scranton.
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1356 13 12
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I asked him where he hurt and he said everywhere.
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1411 13 11
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I tried to talk, but only / whispers slithered out.
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1609 13 11
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Know what you’ll become? You’ll become one of those guys who masturbates in any single occupancy restroom that locks.
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1348 13 13
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Of course then I did it all over again. Got married, that is. Fortunately, this one worked out.
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1208 13 6
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She’s changed leaves to emeralds. Worn a shawl of inked birds’ wings.
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1371 13 12
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Myrna came home from her new, midnight shift, waitressing job at the Waffle House saying she was sorry but she couldn't take any more gray-haired Jesus-types with their dollar bills held high, releasing a few so they would flutter, as if borne by wings, onto the tables as…
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1467 13 6
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...galaxies burst into an infinite slide-show of the absolute... god?
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1679 13 15
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We wonder if this is how we tangled in our mother's womb: hands to feet to heart.
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1386 13 7
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His note said: “I’m sick of low attendance.”
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1531 13 11
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When the planes crashed,when the levees broke,when the ground shook,there was a song I dreamed of,humming subsonic,a chorus of voices and prayersuncorked like the little brown jugthat holds all the love and memories.In the outback, Aborigines believewe create the world by…
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1284 13 8
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All the years since, until this morning, I'd thought the actor was James Gregory.
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1545 13 13
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Train whistles in wintertime made him feel lonely.
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1519 13 3
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As American as hotdogs and apple pie...
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1291 13 10
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You should never have believed your daddy when he said a man with half a dog was better off than a man with no dog at all.
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1232 13 11
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I was always more comfortable with the ponies than you were / more comfortable with betting windows and two-dollar bills than you were
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1546 13 4
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I was desperate for a social life but I couldn’t go out because I was too embarrassed to smile.
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1186 13 9
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Those who don’t die, desire, descend. No song aloft arises from my irk. The seeing chieftain, not of sea, nor sand, nor boat, I till nightfall stammer alive, dig boneless trenches against tiding dregs and lathe, hunt, wallow, plow the hours, call in awei
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1704 13 11
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that moon does not think (unless mineral thoughts) . . .
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682 13 10
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By the end of my Saturday night shift at the Oyster Bar I look like some kind of filthy nurse
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1336 13 3
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The two were huddled in a corner of an alley, joined by some others that I’m sure wandered into the darkness when they realized they were far from alone. That alley was the one off Market Street. I used to steal candy from the corner shop when I was nin
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1311 13 12
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Today I'm feeling fertilized by an egg—
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