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For The Sea of Pill

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In his dreams, he swam in piles of pills. Sometimes the piles were infinite, other times the were contained, tonight the pills were intense shiny reds, chalky yellows, deep blues and matte purples and swirled around in a children's inflatable castle. Derek swam happily,…

Quitting

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The dancer was a little chubby, but I didn't mind. It gave her more to shake.

A Little Piece of Humanity

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It wasn't meant to happen like this— the shutter, the feeling of breathlessness when he touched her shoulder, even after he had pointed out all of the things she had done incorrectly throughout the day. They had been married for five years in February, and as…

SMOKE

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And so it begins, like this, waiting to long for a lazy train out of West Toledo...

The Great San Francisco Poetry Wars, 15

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Steve Bancroft’s future wife showed up at his door that same night, slamming her hand loudly against the door and shouting for him. “Steve, Steve, wake up. Damn it, come on. You forgot to pick me up at the airport. Who are you in there with? I said wa

Crawl

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Crawl to the dark places I love most, loud music and off key laughter, glimmering green and brown bottles eagerly holding the dim lights overhead inside themselves like ransomed stars.

Chattanooga Afternoon / Let’s Talk About Chattanooga

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Let’s talk about Chattanooga, the cloud / mountains, the monastery bench, drunk / at sunset

Friendsgiving

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Everything would've been copasetic except about the time we got down there they put the turkey in the fryer..

Foundling

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They discovered the baby in the grass, under the snapping cotton sheets.

Inventing Games

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As children we invent games and we're really creative. We concoct ridiculous rules and enjoy making adaptations to them. And everything makes sense. Then you grow up, lose creativity. You don't invent games anymore. Recess is replaced with a second…

Beard of Bees

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Beard of Bees My father always used to say to me, he said "Son" (he called me son) "Son. Falling in love is easy. Getting into the Guinness Book of World Records is hard".

Doorface

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Doorface has a door for a face. Thus his name. He was born with it. The door in his face, not his name. No one is born with a name. The naming comes later.Doorface finds his unusual physiognomy mildly inconvenient. People keep trying to enter his head. No one likes it when…

Dirty Aubade

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We could kiss under the elder tree, even though it was forbidden, even though we were drowned by the noise of the river and nothing we said was right

Man In Hiding

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I answered with my usual economy of words. If someone wants more, they must ask, and he did.

Hymen

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For me German was a school subject. For Hymen, who could pronounce German but not speak it, it was a poetic technique or element, shorthand for what ails the world.

The Billygoat: A Beast Fable

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“I will become a respected novelist!” proclaimed Billy.

You've Done Good

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For a fleeting moment, eyes seemed to clear and the man spoke as if he were coming out of the pea soup fog that formed over the lake on spring mornings.

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."

Pot-shots- an Octet for the New Year

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Maybe all quarterbacks are shitwads.

Conversation on Thanksgiving

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“You always use that as a crutch. You, a sixteen year old girl. The way you were…” She looked at me, shaking her head, looking at my body as if remembering some wrong, some thing that should not have been.

Big C and Lil Puppet

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At that time I was meeting Jacob at 3:30 each afternoon in Joan of Arc Park so we could walk dogs together. This was our job.

The Crossing

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There was nothing to do but dream ourselves forward. Nothing to do but not die.

Christmas Morning

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

Animals, Animals, Animals

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  Crea grew up above a pet store and now she dreams of cats. There are too many of them to name, a slinking mess of calico, tabby, tortoise-shell, black and white. There are more each night. They whisper to her, words made of hissing mewls. During the…

Arcana Magi - c.20: Compelling

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Danica paused for a moment as thoughts of going to Avalon Tech changed to heading for Mystic Intelligence. She could not understand why she thought about going there.

the morality of pens: a sonnet

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poets can kill, or at least they once could:/ perhaps poems tamed us, if they are any good.

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?"

Mathilda Is Not My Girlfriend

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Some idiot was gonna let a snake eat him. I know, but I saw it on the internets. That's some dumb-assed stuff right there. Everyone knows about snakes. The Jesus book tells us all about them, inside us, slithering through ruby-red and eating our guilt from inside out.…

After Baptism, He Speaks

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The world is full of dead dogs

The Secret

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The sudden sound of his engine starting breaks the silence of the hot, summer, Florida night. As he drives away in his black Chevy truck he glances in the rear view mirror at his girlfriend's house. He tries to forget about the girl he is leaving behind. His heart begins to…