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This is Why We Can Never Have Nice Things

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At age eleven, I murder the coffee table. I gouge with every available implement: thumbtacks, Lefty scissors, the plastic hand of my Barbie accomplice (who really should have known better). It is a slow death. In the end, there is nowhere to hide the body. When I am…

Discuss

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... her hair spills like spinach all the way down to her backpack, the top pocket where the bowl and the cinnamon estrange themselves from the coffee.

How to Forget

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Refuse to go to the church service, even though you already missed the funeral. Tell his mother something came up. Call his phone over and over, just to hear his voice, until his mother asks you to stop. Make a recording of his voicemail. Delete it an

Rock-a-Hoola

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She wears a green and pink bikini and walks real slow, poking her chest out so people will notice her.

April Haiku

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A sardonic moon/ surveys our plight and cackles.

Stupidest. Film Director. EVER!

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["This is not a snippet of text. This is only a test."]

Kite

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One year, she got a kite.

Middle Age

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There are no city-chewed streets,/ only white and lilac blooming dogwood trees.

RETIREMENT

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Men have a way of doing that, Lord, why? I always thought retirement means you get to sleep longer. Nope He must arise early, make breakfast, after 40 years of eating mine. Next, he insists on coming with me to the market. When I try to…

The Devil in Converse

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In se'enties style serenading strut A passin all the pretty birds in kin', The feathered Stetson ‘clipsin crimson suit, A whistlin Dixie blues ‘cross county-lines.

Fragment

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see the man

The Burning Gulf

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None of us ever thought this would happen.

Moles & Scraps

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A starved hunchbacked figure covered in blanket gently steers a one eyed dog along with him. A four legged shadow serving as his longtime companion against the all-consuming vacuum of the universe. A friend for all times.A thin scar runs from his cheekbone to…

Three short-shorts

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Wake up! But it was already too late for Charles.

Elevator Neighbors (from The New Yorker)

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“Do you think she paints?” “Her face, a little, But don’t you find her kind of bony?”

The Wish

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Now coins used for wishing are not like coins used to purchase bread or carrots. Coins that have been invested with the magic of hopes and desires are special and have special properties. The difference between wishing coins and ordinary coins is very subtle.

To Make Way for the Future

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It was the shock of black hair twisted into a long thick braid that got our attention and made us want to find meaning here. Albert thought he recognized the hair in the grave.

I Scream

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she peeled back the white wrapper from around her ice cream sandwich slowly, methodically

Sonnet Nought

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Miraculous tarantulas, and octopii, have many limbs akimbo, Two have you: and they are better than be kept in zoo. Thine eyne are like the marbles that my youth had held in limbo, ‘Cept even better yet, for they are fairly lashed and greeny-blue. Your…

Upon Learning the Fetus Has Fingernails

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Upon learning the fetus has fingernails, Missy texts her boyfriend: It has nails! He won’t reply because he’s just left for war, but she does it just the same.

A Little Fishing

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Harpo sits and looks at something I can't see. I drink beer and ask him questions. I ask him how they found the cancer. Backache, he says. He went to see a doctor.

Walking To Gibraltar, Epigram & Chapter 1: So It Was Cancer

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So it was cancer. And so he was screwed, royally screwed. He was screwed all the more because he knew how screwed he was. He had to carry the shame of knowing, as much as he wanted to deny it, that this had been his first thought when he found out about h

WE NEVER

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No news spreads faster than news of a death. Word of the death of a child can be heard simultaneously in a thousand places. . . the word spread by telephone, in back yards from clothesline to clothesline, with whispers in grocery stores, in the looks on faces stunned into…

Noah's Ark, NYC

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Two by two they come walking down 7th Ave girl with girl boy and girl boy and boy two pigeons strolling side by side two robins two crows walking stiffly like two pieces of anthracite coal two spiders two dogs sniffing each oth

The Spider and the Corpse, Or, The Corpse and the Spider

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The corpse lay silently in his open casket. Dressed in the finest silken suit. Italian. Rubber skin pulled over his bones. Arms folded in eternal prayer.

Act of Creation

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Mary ran her cake business in a way she could never have run her marriage. It was by appointment only, full deposit, partial refund (and this purely at her own discretion). Business was terrific and she had to turn down job after job. She only made…

Tribal Elder

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"Look at this," she says while thumbing through the guide book, "look at what we can do on Jooga Booga island. Says here, 'Parasailing over the sapphire blue sea, one soars hundred of feet above water-skiers, boaters, and snorkelers, and the picture is b

Truth at a Bonsai Booth

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I envisioned bound feet of ancient Asian women who wore embroidered slippers that hid grotesque disfigurements.

Food for Thought

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I could never be a chef.Preparing creations that will merely be consumed.If I were a chef,I'd have to create dishes that required chewingand chewing and chewing.I'd find it better for my dishes to be destroyed in the mouth.Remembered for their…

How Elm Trees Die

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I had felt suddenly lighter and next thing I knew I was watching Leonard Tucker and Sister William from somewhere near the ceiling. I saw myself, too, at my desk, holding my songbook out in front of me like everyone else.