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Naughty Alice -- There's No Laughter When You're Extinct

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Does life have an expiration date Alice asked herself? One must be careful when trying to deal with a broken person; you might cut yourself on their shattered pieces. Life can be like an arrow penetrating your heart. Hard and painful to pull it out, yet i

The Need To Tell Somebody

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He just had to tell somebody. Anybody. So he called up his publisher, L., who agreed to meet him at Oliveira’s for a drink. It only took about ten minutes to walk there from his big duplex in the Elmwood, where he was still living with his wife among

ace in the hole

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hookers are better educated these days

Small Budget Poems

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Toxins make a body happy/ as if acceleration toward// an end of consciousness/ is its own reward.

Arcana Magi Memorial Vol.3 - c.4

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Their faces covered in shadow, smiles so relaxing, a tall woman approached her, gently rubbing her face. Her lips moved with no sound, but Sora subconsciously understood what she said.

Stop-time Animation of the Cosmos

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Reality for us must be broken so we can fix the one small insect of it we can capture and pin, wriggling.

Balconies

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In a few brief moments the entire sky became full of this wetness and greyed to the point of almost blackening, and it was a Sunday morning, and the man thought that thoughts were strange things, because he had a piercing epiphany that there was no God..

Do I hear Ten Thousand?

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I cannot begin to list all the ways this conversation can go downhill from here, so I hang up the phone quietly.

Book Review: Cinema Verite’ a book of poems by Sam Rasnake

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Cinema Verite’ is the best book of poems I have encountered since Matthea Harvey’s Modern Life

Squirm

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“We should start a virgins' support group,” said Cindi one autumn afternoon. We were sitting in the bay window of the Campus Coffee Cavern ...

Contract Love

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“If you guys ever get back together, I’d make him sign a contract.” I smiled, but cautioned, “Not sure that would work.” She answered with emphatic confidence, “You haven’t seen how good I am at writing contracts!"

Gold Digger

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Sophie hoped that Ryan would just stay in the bathroom and never come out. Her stomach turned just thinking about him, but wealthy nerds were easier to work than wealthy regular guys. No self-esteem, no experience with women…no problem.

Back in the Shower

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Naked, we stood in my shower. When she kicked my tool, I noticed she had a toe ring.

The Search

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“Sixty-seven responses!” Al Edelstein announces at the first meeting of the search committee. It has been just two weeks since Rabbi Feldman dropped dead of a heart attack and just a week since the congregation ran the ad: “Help Wanted: Orthodox Rabbi. Im

Maggie's Mayhem

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Tonight was no remarkable night. The sun rose and set without question, children’s hearts broke with truth, around the world millions of people lost someone they cared about, millions people fell in love. It was an average day—it was unremarkable. It w

On being offered a seat on the Bart train

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Remember when I entered a room and turned heads is my youthful charm a sputtering fire in the hearth

First Chapter of Rain (novel)

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Every day she loves me a little less, and justifies it by saying that there is less of me to love. At some crucial, overlooked space in our life together, I used up my compassion and started to spend hers.

chicken coup

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" I have no idea what's goin on out here, and I'm gonna find out one way or another."

Why I Write

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Creep up behind me one day and prick my skin. I promise you won’t draw blood – for it is ink that will spurt from my veins.

Highway Robbery

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I knew her face but not her hair, at least not the right way up.

DING!

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He tapped his foot, swished his hips, swaying across the worn tile floor with an invisible partner in his arms, the batter-coated spoon still clutched in his right hand, momentarily forgotten. Nearly a decade had passed since he last shared a dance with h

Two More Poems

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1. Weeds of the World (Unite!) We invade the invaders and they invade us, these little Blooming weeds. They raise five flowers and let them blow Into the winds like sheets of stars. All of us Steer by their turning tide. All of us will eventually …

A Piece of the Sky

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For the briefest moment, she was part of the sky. She hung there. Frozen. Suspended. Arms outstretched. She thought maybe she could take off flying, if she strained against gravity hard enough. She would soar into the pale blue until she reached the clouds. They …

Two Weeks After the Shadow

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Two weeks after the shadow shows up in Stephen's x-ray, you decide to do something about the bucket in the garden. You start by wedging it underneath the faucet in the back yard so tightly that it pushes against the pipe with the groan of grinding metal. Now the hose is…

All The Right Steps

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"I didn’t take my mother’s denial of my dream lightly. I wanted it desperately. I cried and pleaded, nagged and begged. On several occasions, I temperamentally got out of the car at a stop sign and walked. Once, my mother said that I was nagging her so mu

Insomnia

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They sit, they create, they watch.

The Sway

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When it was sticky cool at night, he'd pull her hair up off her neck and spin it like a pinwheel. “You could be anything," he would say. “You could be a preschool teacher.” She waited for him to add, “For dragons! For wallabees! For…

laundry

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She’d once read the Time-Life Encyclopedia on The Universe and became obsessed with the woman from Alabama who was singled out, by a rock from a far place, in her sleep.

Man, Ending

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The man had decided that this was going to be his last day. He’d find out one final thing and he’d be done. He had spent the last few years of his life unwinding things that had been wound and untying knots that had been tied.

An Account of my Dwelling (for Kamo no Chômei)

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[B]y fleeing the city to live on the outskirts of nowhere—a place so far off the beaten path that even Duras’s aging Mr. Andesmas would have felt isolated—I was of course trying to escape from none other than myself.