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Someone had shown me a page on the internet where writers could have their stories analyzed, seeing whose work their piece was similar to. Normally, I only went on the computer to find apartment listings and pornography.

Breathing

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After only a few months’ practice I am able to dive deep within myself. Inhale. A millisecond stop and I am under the surface. I know there is something here within myself – some treasure that I have come to find.

Old Penny

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Nothing about it// is attractive- its color, it’s design,/ it’s market value. I leave it be and watch

3 Poems

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We have always been a trashy species./ We study ourselves by examining/ garbage-- a pile of mussel shells here,

Paperclip

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The Americans don't want us. They want knowledge. They want to eat with us. They want technology and weapons. They want the results of research they themselves are too craven to perform, answers to questions they ask themselves in whispers, in the dark. T

Why Things Are Just OK with Me

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With such demeaning precarity, I can’t read/ anything more than a thousand words

'My Mother Was My Sister' — Rejection Letter to a Young Writer (Memoir)

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When I was 10 or 11, some people thought that my father was my grandfather, that my brother was my father, and that my mother was my sister!

Crackle

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As he brushes his shoulders against other people's shoulders until he almost has no shoulders –

If we thought that love was gone

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If we thought that love was gone that out of sweetness none remained

Fair-Weather Best Friends Forever

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“How scared?” Mikey said, not wanting to find out, and already looking pretty nervous.

Building

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he told me to be careful,my feet may bleedI watched him walk up and down the path,occasionally bendingwhy?carpenter nails, pieces of broken shinglesall along the pathnow I know why

-And Lurking Behind Quasar 3C295 . . .

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“Let’s see that great big telescope of yours,” she exhaled hotly, “I want to grind your lenses!” The doctoral candidate dutifully stood between her and his massive telescope so her hands would encounter some instrumentation with no optical components.

Lost in Suomi

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Wind pummeled me awake, smelling of pine and some quality of newness I could not identify...

SoliTaire

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She couldn’t help but wonder what 93 year-old Sohrabjee looked for in the torn, dusty lithograph of Marilyn in Persia one of the orderlies had stuck to the wall of the corridor outside Jasmine Wing decades ago.

Extra Ticket

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My best friend died yesterday. His name was Franklin Seever, but we all called him Lin. It started when we were in Little League. There were two Franklins on the team so Coach, who was my dad, called the fat one Frank and my best friend Lin.

Edward Ogle the Third

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Assimilated wheat germ integrated ant worm the capital of brazil.

Tuscaloosa

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a Ferris wheel gently rocks its last riders then dumps them to the ground.

Amy-Loyd Plax

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When I no longer know you, what signal will you give to remind me that you and I once loved?

Baking Bread

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the champagne foam cascades like cherry blossom ensnared in the first gales of spring

Paris in the the Spring

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he thought of her / longingly

Drift

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Dreams & foghorns.

Searching for a poem

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Each person in each car could be poetic/ Duende, but they look at each other and ask/“Did you fart?”

Clockwork

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At any moment, she'll come outside to pick up the day’s newspaper. He can see it resting beneath the blooming crape myrtle, its plastic wrapper glistening with dew.

Creator

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What purpose other than misery/ can cancer serve? And Parkinson's,/ AIDS, and STDs?

Maritzer's Axiom

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We were just as bourgeois as Bloomingdale’s, one generation past canned ravioli dinners with cheap white bread.

The Signal

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I take the plastic off of the last videotape and stick it in the VCR. I make sure the channel is on 6. Still a commercial. I get my notebook, turn it to the next page and write today's date on top. I get ready. I don't really like the back and forth banter the other news…

Internet Hole (an excerpt from Psychopomp)

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Seventeen-year cicadas are the sometimes-singers that surprise spring with the ugliest mouths of all.

Criminals

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What about the goons? Those criminals thwarted and left for dead in every action movie for the past thirty years. I'm sure at least a dozen survived the slaughters. I'm sure at least one or two came out if it reformed. This one who quit working for Columbian drug smugglers…

The Red Suitcase: (Conclusion)

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—You must be joking, he laughed.

A Black Cat

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And then, and then, and then! After all that, this. After all that bullshit with her Dad, the Associate Principal, the idiotic counselor, and that psychotic police officer, after all that, this: a dead black cat. Blocking her path! Right in the middle of the street! …