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soft soap

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you were very very small, you were everso small, you were like – the tiniest creature, hopping about on one leg

Pumpkin Patch

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Artie invited me to go with him to pick out a Halloween Pumpkin for the house. I had recently moved into a communal living situation and we were still getting to know each other. Artie was the kind of person who made a special occasion out of ordinary life. Why…

What Gorillas 'Talk' About When Gorillas 'Talk' About Love

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Eons later, Bobo evolves into Shakespeare. Bonus feature: wings.

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.

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…

South 55

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This is a wife pregnant with spiders

Skype's Not for Losers. Really.

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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 . . ."

A Bar at the Folies-Bergere. Manet

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The mystery is in the barmaid's impersonal stare It's all there. Recognizable the bottles of Bass Ale and Crème de Menthe. Glazed oranges piled in a bowl Two roses in a small clear glass of water A wide gold bracelet on her arm, halfway up from

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…

The Birth of Girma Dali

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Amid the swerve and pulse of hungry bodies Girma Dali picks his spot, a tissue-wide patch of net where's he going to strike. A green-jerseyed defender closes in on him his brute momentum unleashed like a kamikaze pilot swooping into enemy orbit, his lunging body makes…

Bon Bons

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love notes yellowed through the years

"Hadrian's Farewell" as Tanka and Haiku

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

Borges in the SUB

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"There's Borges."

The Haunting

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the ugliness will not be denied

Is That You, Bugs?

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Poor kid. She didn't mean to leave my business card on her kitchen counter next to the telephone. It was a mistake.

Fishers of Hope

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June Day sprinted with urgency through the halls of the Armistice. Whenever she passed a window looking out into space, if it wasn't already covered, she didn't bother looking out, but not because of her hurry; no one did anymore. She was young, but the…

Rear View

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The man of a thousand faces was defunct.

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

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

Hurricane Shutters

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The thing that really gets you about the house is the hurricane shutters. They're up already, even though it's the end of May, because Buck's uncle is back in Rhode Island for the summer and he's prepped the house on Key Largo like Armageddon is coming.

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."

cloth

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i want out

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…

Working Girl

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Suddenly a hand shot up on the other side of a hedge. “I’ll have one of those!” cried someone who remained invisible.

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…

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