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Zhou Yu’s Train

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Are we like a poem, a short hand of words curtained together, evoking a mood, but in the end, impenetrable? We follow the clues to our lover's heart and what we find isn't him at all but ourselves. We fill every part of his life, every part of his past and even become…

Arcana Magi - c.27: Hard Battle

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A burst of mud spilled out over Jonas and scooped his body up like a raging river. It spun his body over in a rebound rather than pushing him through the door.

The Unpublished Writer and His Love Interest (The Painter)

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When the writer expressed with subtle alacrity that he adored the painter, she was flattered and didn't raise objection. The writer-in his aloof manner, with experienced caution-pointedly wrote a poem directly for his muse. She never spoke of it, and hi

Soon to Be a Minor Motion Picture (excerpt)

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Man, you never ceased to crack me up! If you thought you'd just been called a homo, you probably wouldn't want to try to disprove it by grabbing hold of a naked guy and wrestling him to the floor of a shower room.

Test Day

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“I need an ambulance, we found a baby in a ditch.”

Perversion

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“It’s a sad thing,” I said, “when a man has to suffer just for getting a little on the side.”

What The Hell Nationality Are You?

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It’s confusing enough to grow up in a place like America, a country without definitive culture, except for ranch dressing and reality TV, but it’s even worse to grow up half one thing, half another, christened a hyphenation of names without connection to

Girl Friends

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Two women grab a table near a window in a coffee shop. Outside, the sky is the color of dulled aluminum. It is early spring and pollen assaults the air with a tint of sulfur.

Contagious Blinking

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He pulls on his wispy goatee and shifts his weight a few times from one foot to the other. That doesn’t help. It rarely does, to be honest.

Do you dream?

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Megalomania is a kind of backwards leprosy. It rots your insides out while your skin glistens and grows tighter around your bones.

Wild Garden

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Even though it was late November, it still bloomed. Extravagantly. Obviously it had no shame, obviously it reveled in its own beauty.

Relativity

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It seems every time we get together, Seiko is there. She just started working in Keiko's department and now they're always together. I think Keiko feels responsible for Seiko. Like if Seiko's not getting any, it's bad manners for Keiko to do it.

A New Notion about an Old Story

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A dark girl, quite poor, maybe three, maybe four, leaned on a statue of a horse and his man. (The rider rode him in place, but as if in a race.) Her dress needed patching, her heart needed smoothing. She'd tried to sell…

The Strongest Girl in the World

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At the edge of the forest, his sister began to complain about how everybody—their mother and father and all of her friends included—hated her. It was exasperating, the light she sometimes put herself in. The fact of the matter was that she received more

Medusas

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I didn’t kiss Odgeir because I fancied him, I kissed him because I knew other people fancied him.

Frostproof Suite: Saint John’s Eve

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Everyone at the Bermudez Brothers Combined Shows and Circus held one low opinion or another about Jimmy Dubcek.

Bad Luck and Trouble

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Jake goes back inside, turns on the TV, and sits down. It is the end of the world! A lane of the Bay Bridge has fallen into the bay. A building downtown has lost its skin.

Paperwork

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There were literally thousands of criteria that got people of every stripe and strata on the list, which had been maintained since before the very first human fingers scrawled crude images on blank surfaces. 

Napomo 17: April 7-12

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The drinking will continue/ until morale improves

The Art of It

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To write a good poem, one needs nothing but the whole intent of goodness.

Prairie Rose

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Every Friday night she gets liberated at The Haymarket Square doing a bunny hop or a do si do with ex-members of The Saint Augustine Women's Choir. She remembers how as kids, shy or awkward in dresses, their voices formed the harmony, the flight of something V-shaped…

I Like You ‘Cause You Like Me

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And you don't like much. No handholding or brand name sweaters. No phone calls late at night. This is not you. And you certainly don't go for kisses in the rain or cards from the grocery store with…

Post-Op

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She tells Tuesday's lover that there's nothing wrong with cheap thrills without anesthesia,

Birth and Death of a Concrete Icon

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Homer relaxes in his tan, faded recliner, remote in hand, and watches death unfold on his television.

Madi's Love

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The depth of her love for Briana could only be heard on the 80’s ballads station fumbling from the stereo in Madi’s car, awkward, just like her smile.

Fear in a Handful of Dust / National Poetry Month 2015 30 Poems

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Fear in a Handful of Dust

Wednesdays They Pay Us, But Now It's Thursday

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fire rolls through the drive-thru

Mud

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People ask me sometimes what it’s like to meet your wife when you’re six years old, and I have to admit now that I don’t really understand the question. Marla and I, we were just friends for most of that time. She made me laugh. I let her crib off my math

V-J Day

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August 14, 1945.Vincent had kissed a lot of girls before then - and a lot of women after. But there had never been a kiss like that one. And because of that photo apparently the whole country, damned near the whole world, thought so too.He'd tried to get her…

Roanne's Dream

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Roanne banged the chiva, turned tricks, and ran out of road.