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Cutting Rhubarb in the Rain

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Tendering these stalks, making the pie, heralds me a holder of apron strings...

Our 2015 Holiday Letter…Sort Of

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“Why do I have to sign these cards? You haven't written your dreaded holiday letter yet.” “I told you not to complain or you'd be the one writing it. And addressing the envelopes. Then you can stamp them and take them to the Post Office!” …

Love, a comet, omens and wings

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My love for him like wax wings/ so long they stretched eternal— beating in the sky, grazing peaks,

Oaxaca Dreamland

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She thinks she trusts this man; she wants to trust him. His face reminds her of a man who once took care of her on an airplane when she was a kid traveling by herself.

Tales from an Indiscriminate Record Collection

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45s I’ve kept wrapped in newspaper in the attic. These are all mine. Some doubling up in sleeves. Some pushing tears in the seams.

Virginity

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It rises rigid and plumb from its heavy base, the severity of line yielding to grace only at the throat where it crests into a subtly constrictive pinch.

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…

The Day You Told Me You Fucked Her

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I imagined you going at her in ferocious fucking-- / O, O, O, O, O, O, O Immortal Glistening Cock,

Spinning

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Ride me, I say, and you never hear. No matter how I shine my padding, it's never what draws you to me. I only get to touch you when you feel guilty, and most of the time, it's only through shorts and graduated compression socks. What does my desire matter? It all comes out…

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

Librarians! What Are We Hiding?

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Librarians are hiding something. What is it?

Mare

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She pulls out of love, while you sit upon the rumble seat, a granted is taken for every crack of the whip. She pulls out of fear. She pulls.

Not Lao-tzu's Yellow Brick Road, xxviii - xxxvii

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master carvers do not reduce with carving.

Right and Wrong

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Uncle Tee, a dog handler, taught all the camp children their basics: how to "make change" from a $10-bill, how to slip a hand into ladies' purses, and how to make their smiles warm and endearing.

Eggshells

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The eggs got badder as the cook got madder

Star Heart

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This is the place I could find my breath. I didn'tSay I understood it. I only wanted to hold someone andMeant to. I don't care about the rules for caring.This place where I could speak was incredibly far from Where I'd once met you. The place where I could…

All the Broken People

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We all// fall short and fail.

MYTHO-THERAPY ON THE BLINK

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Once upon a time, not so long ago in Los Angeles, Jack and Jill Woodman’s father remarried.

Ya Sure You Betcha (A Syttende Mai Challenge)

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Nora never dated Scandinavians.

The Escapists

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I sought to feel something. I hunted my mortality. I craved that rush of life pulsating through my veins.

2006, What I Wanted

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freedom from my mind

Laughingly rejected by The New Yorker

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...and we laughed.

The Hiders

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The Kharal kept us safe, we knew, kept the colony functional in the oft belabored effort that was living our small, human lives surrounded by death, for in their ring of constant invisible protection, when they did not come, we thrived. It was not as tho

Forever Four-Eyed

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I'm a librarian. A reader. I identify as a four-eyed person. I've always worn glasses. I got my first pair in the second grade. It was a miracle! The blurry world I'd inhabited all my life suddenly came into focus. I could see the blackboard! I could read street signs! I…

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.

The Goldsmith's Anniversary

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He searched for something deserving of the word “bestowed,” something so rare as to horrify the clerics of ordinariness.

Dangling About

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Looking at his pale and pimpled flesh, he was repulsed by his flaccid and lifeless member. The accompanying bits, dangled about far from his frame as the summer heat drew them away from his sweaty and unwashed body.

Luc

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Her wrinkles came into focus, the sort of old woman's face photographed for coffee tables and art galleries and corporate boardrooms, for prize juries and grant selection committees, and Luc searched his formidable memory for an exact match. Over the long, tedious…

Laundromat

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Who am I?

A Clean Tent

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“No,” he says. A simple lie. “I -” He pushes the sleeping bag off of his legs. Their getaway reset was a mistake.