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City of Masks

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"There is something in the air. It makes people sick, makes them want to die. They cannot inhale too deeply for fear that it will turn them mad."

Giacometti

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He tells me that only a few things had happened in his life but some of them he had felt deeply.

How I Left Onandaga County

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So, like I said. Da. I have dealt with the men, when I was a lap dancer. The men they need the….manipulations. I have good hands. They want me to see them naked, their power. Here it is only the women. The massage, the facial, the waxing...

Undressing The Moon

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the white moon is dangling by a thread tonight you close your eyes and listen to it undress and suppress, suppress you listen to it undress while you yourself hang lifeless in your own arms not meaning to do yourself any harm, not

love poem for the homeless man who was killed on wednesday night

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it was your hands—caked with years-old clay & quaking from too much solitude

Jorge Curioso Flies a Plane

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This is Jorge. He was a good little monkey. And always curious.Like the time he and his friend, the man in the amarillo sombrero, had to fly to Japan. *Jorge sat by the window. Watched the ground get further away. Until they were above the clouds. He looked out…

Jambalaya

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Your writing offended the editors greatly, and we would select certain word choices we disliked, but we truly hated every word, including mere articles, prepositions, and conjunctions.

Three Network News Ledes on the Death of Jimmy Buffet

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“He spent four lonely days in a brown L.A. haze, and now Jimmy Buffet is dead.” —Brian Williams, NBC Nightly News “Jimmy Buffet—beloved parrot-head singer-songwriter—has given up his search for that lost shaker of salt. He…

Bon Bons

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love notes yellowed through the years

The Same

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The bus is late; the papers disappear. The china breaks, and the suit does not fit.

A Chaos Theory

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—with spinster goddesses in the middle of things / circling looms.

Clicking

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Reining her small hands around the molded handle grips, her bottom bouncing athwart and wildly off the seat, Symphony wrenches her center of gravity inward, commandeering as much control from the road it would allow. With her breaks behaving as stubborn

The Haunting

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the ugliness will not be denied

David and Goliath

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The giant hurled threats and insults. He brandished a knife that was a foot long.

Hermano Sandwich

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His mouth smiled but his icy eyes did not. "You like it?," he asked with a thin deflated voice. "Old family recipe. Enjoy."

Saga of the Sugar Ants

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They’re persistent, I’ll give them that. They keep coming. And coming and coming.

That Which Does Not Kill You (Only Postpones The Inevitable)

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Harold Smithe awoke that Tuesday morning precisely at 6 am. He did this every day for as long as he could remember. Even on the weekends when his schedule varied. Well, varied slightly. He lay in bed trying to wake up and mulled over the things he needed to accomplish for…

To All the Lights

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I have nothing in me but a raw loneliness right now. It's as if someone whirl-winded me out of the sky into the middle of the ocean in the middle of the red faced night. My fate seems immobile, sealed, doomed to a rocking nothingness, like…

"Hadrian's Farewell" as Tanka and Haiku

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Little rambling soul,/kind guest, friend: leave me laughing,/pallid stiff, and bare.

The Great San Francisco Poetry Wars, 5

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and we got the apartment, which was on a street that backed up on an alley situated, as it turned out, right across the alley from the very first Hari Krishna house, where they would wake up at four every morning and begin their maddening chanting: Hari K

Interstate

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By Jackson, you called and said, I'll be too drunk to drive. Hell, if I do my very best, I could be blind by Shreveport.

We Don't Need a Guitar Man

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The courtroom smelled a lot like mold and it was hot as you could imagine. I sweated through my shirt and wondered if he wasn’t dying under his robe. He looked down at me from his bench and I just knew he was going to call me a commie and sentence me to l

Welcome to the Dark Walls

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“No one ever notices everything: but sometimes it happens, when no one is noticing everything, everyone misses the same thing in the same moment . . ."

Rough Draft

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fated and cruel, a person I don't love

The Madness of the Gods

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“Have you heard about Lucius?” The lawyer turned to the carpenter. “They say he's gone mad. Just gone; the madness of the gods.” Sitting in the barbershop were the former two, one in his forties and the other of his fifties; a gray-haired…

Molasses

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My T-shirt read BOO HOO.

South 55

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This is a wife pregnant with spiders

Borges in the SUB

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"There's Borges."

Drought

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Where we live, at the edge of the foothills at the east edge of town, fire is always a worry during the summer, and this has been an exceptionally dry year.

Dragon Lady

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What happened later that evening is unclear. When Mickey got back to his quarters, he was in good spirits. Buoyant even.