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God Wants a Sandwich

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Two cars smashed together, the sky started to look like a foot infected with gout...

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

Graeme King and the Creature

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Graeme King was disturbed. He sat at his desk feeling his bloodshot eyes rolling backwards, impatient, leaden in their sockets. Could he believe what he had just seen? Surely not. Surely the late nights spent absorbing the relentless pulse of his computer screen…

The World Has Let Me Down

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My mother and I are close We talk like friends I tell her about people I'm dating She gets excited for me And she asks how it's going When I tell her I think I'm gay She says nothing She does not ask about the woman I am seeing She does not ask how I am doing …

Touch Me

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The blood from my palm runs across the rocky surface of the shell. I push the knife into the crease again, searching for a weakness, the one space where the two sides will gasp and then separate. You tell me it doesn’t matter.

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.

The man-faced boy

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And so the man-faced boy grew alone, knowing little of kindness and love. As he grew, he explored the limits of his cold world; crawling in dusty nappies, toddling in hand-me-down rags, at last walking on worn sandals, haunting the edges of human life loo

Brink of Extinction_Chapter One

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The year is 2110. The earth is no longer habitual for human beings. The oceans are gone, the sky is red and radiated and the last vestiges of human civilian are located within the confines of massive barrier cities. For a century mankind has been at war w

Rebekah Just When the Drought Was Ending

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But the best thing about Rebekah was the way she floated always beneath the scent of woodburn and dusty Middle America,

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

A Thousand Books

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I gave away 1000 books.

Meanwhile

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I saw/ star shine in/ my silver pail

Ninja

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She catches my head in a leg scissors and says for me to say Ninja Uncle. Instead, I bite into her flesh that only remotely tastes like a soft salt pretzel.

Funeral

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After the funeral there was a luncheon in the church basement.

Notes on Consulting the 'Owner's Manual for the Human Mind'!

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[CAUTION: TO PREVENT ELECTRIC SHOCK, DO NOT REMOVE COVER. NO USER-SERVICEABLE PARTS INSIDE. REFER SERVICE TO QUALIFIED SERVICE PERSONNEL.]

Bed Bugs are Jumpin' in Thunder Bay

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The little Hannibal Lectors had run like bandits away from the flames and had latched on to their equipment and gear. They screamed as the bugs crawled all over them. When they got back to the station they had to quarantine all their stuff so the bugs w

Letting Go

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Jerrod's lips and tongue were like slabs of bologna someone shook in Kirsten’s face as she hit the turn signal. Kirsten was proud of herself. She'd been taking it well and she was pretty sure her real feelings weren’t poking through.

yaaaay i got the job at deutsche bank!!!!! 5 people like this.

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you'll call it jealousy, but i promise youit's really not, because i wouldn't liketo have your life any more than i wouldmine. because really, i lead a life notunlike that of a housecat, knockingaround and getting spooked by closingdoors when i know nobody is in. what…

Folded Flower

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Attached in the center were the petals of a small flower pressed in wax paper. Uncreased, she read it out loud

Taking a Job

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Teaching never occurred to me in college. I took workshops and wrote often. Friends and classmates, meanwhile, switched from studio majors to Art Education, or from English to Certification. Not me. Teaching high-schoolers would be all wrong. Briefly, I…

The She-Wolf of Leningrad

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The heavyset blind woman came into the art opening without a dog or a cane.

Hysteria

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On the birthday before he started school, he received a pencil case from his paternal grandparents. The violet, oblong pouch contained a pencil and a pencil sharpener in the same color. He didn't remember what had happened with the pencil or the sharpener, but he had…

Flashes

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The thunder rolled like an old Bob Dylan tour...

The Spoken World

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The spoken world is bigger than I had ever imagined it to be, wonderful and relentless and unforgiving, and to be a part of it was my grandest childhood fantasy. I don’t know what the world sees me as now, but inside I will always be a stutterer.

Oedipus Speaks

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I don’t know what happened. One day I was in her room, groping the various drawers for hidden condoms, glimpses of women’s undergarments and I found a spectacular pair of blue lace panties

drinking buddies

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Tonight, Bukowski and I drink together.

True Vocation

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After lunch it's vocal coaching: shrieking, screaming, crying Oh-my-God!-Oh-my-God!-Oh-my-God!, panting and face fanning. Next it's ‘situational training', where we pretend to be audience members on real talk shows and practice everything we've learned th

Nope.

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Can't cope. Got no hope. Got no dope. Call the Pope. Get the rope.

I'm Dying! And I Didn't Make The Bed!

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Five years ago, on January 15, 2009, Flight 1549 took off for Charlotte, North Carolina and, 3 minutes later, made an emergency landing in the Hudson River, with no serious harm to anyone but the geese who caused the problem. (They were liquefied into something…

Mermaids Need Other Mermaids

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Pauleen tries to split open her legs because she doesn’t understand how to love someone without them.