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Key West with Poo and Company

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Excerpt from Flamingo …

Word Fish

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Looking with his ears, Hearing with his eyes, Not really mute, he simply didn't know how to speak.One word, then another string together,a crack spreads across an ice covered lake. Now there is an open channel, and his thoughts roil the…

Absence

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Her mouth was sour; her forehead was still damp with perspiration. She leaned against the bathroom wall and noted her complexion had gone pale. She wanted to slide down the wall and rest until she felt steadier, but…

Good Fences

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I built the fence myself, strong and high and aesthetically pleasing. It was high enough to provide privacy on both sides, but from my bedroom balcony I could see everything. More than I wanted to see.

What Memory Holds

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There's this sepia-toned photograph, which my mother gave me, of my brother and me when we were still both youngsters. In the picture my brother's dressed in a skimpy checked suit whose sleeves were already too short for him — on its way to becoming my

Malady

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When the malady struck and the world fell dark at noon, she and I groped the walls and found our front door. Outside, bewildered, we heard the whine of jets in free-fall, explosions in the imagined distance. And we heard a car — or was it a truck that veered…

The Red Slit

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Kitchen. sandwich. wife. daughter.

John Bonham

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There is an empty space, between every note in rock 'n' roll, where they have buried John Bonham,

History of Moon Velveeta

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Only ever been twelve men on the moon. And one cheese.

SOME NIGHTS

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Some nights you really feel it.

Last Bell

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Coward, cuckold, she taunts: So be it. He's not a young man anymore, nor as clever as he once was, or thought.

A Brief History of The Real

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A little contempuous aside by the critical theorist guy, Frederick Jameson-- that it was logically absurd to call anything that human beings do, produce or effect “unnatural,”-- has brought forth the following. We are…

The Good Boy

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I blinked the darkness out of my eyes and saw the man again; I could smell his breath. Just like dad’s. I must have fallen asleep. My eyes felt so heavy. I was cold. Why was I cold?

O'Arlo's Journal: About Myself

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Every morning if I don't have to go potty....

Not If, But When

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She tells me I have to face the fact that I have the heart of the Tin Man. I know the story. He had none. She is very sensitive and I have to measure my remarks because words bruise her so easily. So, I…

The Game

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Cammie Richard's house was just like all the others in Wilchester. The exterior was vaguely reminiscent of the Dutch style; gray stone with cross beams of dark wood, with two stories and a bay window. Her yard was fertilizer green, with a giant STRATFORD FOOTBALL…

Too Fast to be Fat

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As it turns out, hypertravel is surprisingly slimming.

Your Move, Blattarian!

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Scavenge at that address only if you feel possessed of great courage, a profound faith in resurrection or reincarnation, or an impatient desire for a premature date with certain death.

Vienna

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I remember thinking the seasons are arriving later every year, as if the world has been slowed by the weight of graves.

Madness

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I read my book of names. Over and over again. Our name appeared in the newspaper 254,991 times between 1896 and 1944.

Remember the Maine

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He remembered waking up on those lazy summer days hearing the sad song of mourning doves.

Take the 40 Million Years Without Sex Challenge!

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Scientists have determined that a tiny freshwater organism known as the "bdelloid rotifer" gave up sex 40 million years ago. And you thought the spark had gone out of your marriage.

March

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Crows etc.

Lonely Hearts

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He didn't hide it. He told her he was a mortician when he called. He had responded to her ad in the Lonely Hearts section of the newspaper.

The Comedian

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Sitting near her desk, like a dunce cap, red

Last Visit to the Toy Store

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The two walked around, taking in all the classics: the imported Russian matryoshka dolls of varying styles and bright colors; spinning tops, red Radio Flyer wagons, kaleidoscopes, and wooden yo-yo's invoked memories of Christmases past. The hand-stitched

Leg and Leg and Another Leg

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The robot may be grabbing onto something so big I'm mistaking it for the countryside, or the sunset. I could just be one cog in an infinite chain of leg-attachment, stretching from the cosmos to the sub-atomic.

The Clairvoyant Dwarf, The Jester, and the Tame Elk of Prague

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All were part of the household of Court Astronomer Tycho Brahe (1546-1601) who lost his nose in a duel as a student and went through life thereafter wearing a gold prosthetic one instead and who met and fell in love with a commoner who bore him eigh

Over Medium

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He did it in front of the waiter and everything.

The Great San Francisco Poetry Wars, 14

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I only knew that my heart was not in my life as I was presently living it. I needed the breasts of my Helen in my mouth forever, or I was going to die. Die! Ah, the life of a poet! I couldn’t go on living like this. Why should I go on living like this?