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god

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The litany of tough decisions scrawled on. Stencil Gucci on no-name jeans. Buy cheap chocolate and scrape the name off. I looked over and watching the saliva encrusting in the corner of Larry’s mouth, my heart sank.

Parallelogical Circuit

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{A} So I think maybe I am a robot. If I was a robot, I would do lewd things, metallic (cold, hard, shiny, heavy, malleable, loud, acrid, industrial, immovable, unstoppable) things. I would do the things I do in my dark powerless dreams. People would understand and…

The Bird

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We lived on the edge of a tiny Iowa town, and picked corn fields were steps away.

Wednesday late, Friday early

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I wrote this during a poetry workshop at the Atlantic Center for the Arts with Carolyn Forché. January, 2015. So much more has happened since that stunning week.

Dear Scarlet

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It’s me walking in on you shooting up in the diner’s cesspool of a shitter, and you trying to conceal the evidence while you’re telling me it’s straight up your first time.

Seascape

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They had been wintering on the Cape under gunmetal skies...

The Galleries

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We invent our beauties// as we find them and engineer/ our horrors

Wasps' Nest

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Here’s how you do it. First you get a ladder, a long one.

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.

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.

Admit Nothing

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Traveling in half-lit fluorescence, she smiles up at me, pale and strained

The Diet of Worms

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He had stared at the back of his neck for so long that images of his nape flashed into view randomly throughout the day like interfering signals from a station just out of reach, DESIRE CHANNEL, or something, reminding him of his skewed priorities, his fa

Summer Waters

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A lifeboat came by in the night, And I finally saw we were sinking.

David

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I keep encouraging him to write stories not poems, but I think he enjoys writing things that don’t fit together. Things that stumble.

Long Term Medical Plan

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“It's going to be hitting around the mid-90's tomorrow” said the television expert. “So what? Like 1995?” “Maybe, perhaps even '96” “Does this mean I should break out my Backstreet Boys record?” …

Bullshit Aeneid

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Of arms and the man...

Second Chance

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He arrives at the appointed hour, driving up the dusty road in his '68 Ford truck. On the side is stenciled “Sampson's Farrier Service.” He parks in front of the barn. Patience watches from the front porch, where she has just set down a…

Mystery

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In a corner of a neighbor’s land too stony to till Cob makes a mystery.

A Thought for Emily's Sleep

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Your precious feet were there once, pressed against the familiar floorboards, where your poems suddenly appeared to you, flashing like lightning. I wonder which window they came in? Here's a thought: you were like that window. You caught…

The Investigator

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The investigator starts by accumulating facts, as many facts as he can. He sifts through them with meticulous precision, leaving no leaf unturned, no page unread.

Graduation (For My Mother)

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I know I’m slipping into my mother’s skin. I answer the phone with her voice; her hands grind the coffee beans. And who is this listening to NPR in the morning while the fresh-faced girls in the neighborhood trudge toward school,, peonies han

Erased

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You took up residence on the dark side of things, a bolthole in a wind-flayed right angle of a tower block where pigeons and suicides tumbled blackly on the air currents. You set about drifting off from who you were on a tide of cheap whisky and bad poetry, graduating…

DMV

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When you bring information, it does not arrive.

take

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THERE'D been mutterings on the shareholders' board about a dodgy deal shoved through. In the rush after the towers' thing to get out relevant stock an executive producer had signed off on some film school kid for five big ones to shoot a…

Life during Wartime

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Nothing good comes from being lowered into a well to take a photograph, boy

Maze of Sound

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Beneath the crosshatch gazes of the satellites and above the maze of sound, seahorse clouds exhale a glaucoma haze before they are absorbed into surveillance footage

Seven Things I Learned About David Letterman from Jason Zinoman's "Letterman: The Last Giant of Late Night."

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Never touch David Letterman's neck!

Love Rusts

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Their love was doomed at the onset, yet they engaged in it anyway, heedless of the numerous error messages and critical runtime failures. Abort, Retry, Fail? They selected Retry over and over.

The Room Below

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The closed door swallowed up both voices, and all I could make out afterward were muffled pleas and angry answers that died completely.

The Pilgrimage

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Frey wanted to see heaven without having to die. He had returned from the sea after being gone for three weeks, ranting wildly about a giant ship he had seen in the distance one afternoon.