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Papadad: a portrait

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Papadad has one good eye. The other fell out during a rant and has since been replaced by a rifle scope, which he uses to scrutinise enemies.——Papadad is an authority on everything, even topics he has not researched. He expatiates on these at the dinner table,…

Full Circle

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I staggered away in the storm tears frozen to my cheeks.

Mom’s Blue-green Eyes

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After school watching American Bandstand with my two best friends, all three of us lusting after Bunny Gibson who’s all of sixteen, stacked, and very fucking hot.

Blank Future

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I might as well just keep driving. Past my exit. Beyond my job. Just drive. Until the tank runs out of gas. A blank future is better than this bleak one.

Doctor, My Eyes

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...it was just my heart stnging through my eyes...

Napomo 17: April 7-12

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The drinking will continue/ until morale improves

The Celebrity

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"He doesn't have a parish," I said. "He works in a hospital in the East Bay. He told me that if I were in that hospital and I woke up and saw him, I was in big trouble."

Beards

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One day my mother's lover shaved his beard and legs. Said he couldn’t fit into his tight jeans anymore.

Peach

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"What's that smell?" Osama glares at me from the front seat of the Trans Am. "What smell?" I say. "You smell like a diaper. Are you wearing a diaper?" Osama and Peach both laugh at me. "No... maybe, its my Baby Soft perfume. Is it too strong?"

Polaris

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Things get lost in Big John, too. I see the other guys throw jokes about his size at his body that wedge their way into his armpits or into the wrinkles of his laugh lines and disappear. I’m not sure if it all disappears to remind us how small we are,

Washed Up

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At noon on a weekday in the off season, when the trickle of tourists who wandered into the Mermaid Curio Shoppe had died out completely, she walked in with wet hair, leaving tiny puddles on the floorboards.

We Invented Stillness Just to Keep Ourselves from Following the Fall of Everything

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Even solid seeming concrete creeps/ in time to form the faint smile of deflection./ A marble rolls along the catenary grin.

||||||||||| (Munun)

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Winter melts to ashes and now we walk where hillocks dip like pillows, where a warm pocket of air keeps the scent of spring beauties for itself. Sensitive vetch so easily shocked folds under a feather yet the earth trembles where trout lilies shove. Buds stall on lilacs…

If IT Were YOU

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author's note: the borgs in this story have been programmed to think of themselves as IT and in speech refer to selves as YOU* Though IT too had ball and socket joints, the Borg could not sit down to face ITs inquisitor. While IT felt the need to clean up the fallen…

The Scholiasts

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It was already 3:30 PM. Where had all the time gone? Linda looked up from her computer monitor over at Carlos, who had his face intently pointed at his. "We have to go soon," she said. "We want to avoid rush hour traffic.""Where did we put the address?" Carlos answered, not…

Visitation Hour

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She watches too much VH1 for a five-year-old.

This, About The Man I Met Out Here In Nearly Nowhere

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Out here in nearly nowhere I met this man. About him I know something something, and no one can tell me otherwise.

Mayweather

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where I'm from

When He Left it all to Me

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Where did you go?

Trio of Found Poems

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Paper Bird, Devotchka, TV On The Radio

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.

Lemony snickers on Route 66

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Went back to his cab and returned with a whip...

The Great Bank Run of 1912

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She bought her first gerbil at the age of nine. She wondered if he would die from endless logrolling. When he died from natural causes, she refused to bury him and kept a distance from the first boy who kissed her--Thomas J. Hobbit. The next year a twister swept…

THERE IS AN I.V. OF THE TIMES I HAVE THOUGHT, "I DON'T KNOW WHAT I AM TALKING ABOUT" AND IT IS SWELLING MY VEINS

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god bless my shapeless head. we are good at becoming older. i feel incredibly negative all the time.

Anti

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“What do you call this place?” I didn't really want to talk much in there. For some reason, talking felt too—linear. The words seemed to have a kind of reverberation into associations that seemed somewhat meaningless at the time.”

Diptych for Saint Gertrude of Nivelles, Protectoress Against Mice, Rats, and Mental Illness

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So she set about eliminating the problem, all the time recalling some newsmagazine program she’d seen as a child: a discussion of hantavirus, nasty and deadly and spread by mice.

Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch a pail of water (the update)

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tough noogies

I’m Sure They’ll Have an App for That

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Already they’re taking away my books, supplanting them with Kindles and Nooks.

Christmas Morning

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Dad woke us up and said it was time to go.

Motive

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about killing