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Shaken But Not Stirred

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It happened right after I had taken my Uzi to work, retrieved it from my Brooks Brothers briefcase, and fired it upon my desk and its assorted discontents, their paper lives bunched together by clips and notary stamps of approval, now set flying and free. I then walked into…

The French Revolution

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Judith was a bed wetter. Judith was a first-year college student and she was embarrassed that she wet the bed.

Lips unsealed

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They had a vague idea of how lips were to be used. Lips that parted feverishly, lips that burned. Lips - old, but still amateur. It was no wonder, considering that 'boys from good families' would never dream of even looking at a woman, let alone kiss her!

I Knew Her

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We met in the theater.

Sister (pt. 1)

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Slept on a chair last night in the Springfield, Mass., bus terminal. It was March, and a dude in shorts asked: "Yo, you smoke trees?" I said, "Sure. Who doesn't?" He said, "You buyin'?" I said, "Nope, I'm going out of the country." He smiled and said, "Alright." He started…

Tough Love

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If they don’t cover consequences in your gifted and talented program, you may care to research it.

The Lot

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The inhabitants of the surrounding neighborhood steered clear of the Lot, mindful of its existence, its countless drags of scrap, drenched with the fused association of many scenes and emotions from memory and experience. Left to its own devices, the place is now…

Speak Softly, Tricky Man

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Snow fell against the windows casting shadows that danced like fireflies or flame—he couldn’t make out which for sure. He’d tumbled and bounced from balcony to balcony, the snow calming with the winds and gently falling, now.

The Ann chapter

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The way I felt was as though you were, every day, making the conscious and deliberate decision not to be with me, not to share your life with me—and not to share my life, that you were choosing not someone else, but something else.

Around Close

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You know moments like these. You know how your mother ruins them.

Nausea

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It’s been a series of bad clams

Anniversary Waltz

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He hiked the hills of her condition She biked the path of his delight

Our Names Are Written In Water

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Passing us in a delicate swirl of light perfume and healthy girl sweat, three bare midriff elfin, baby dykes with pencil thin eyebrows, and chic art hair cuts, swaggered in like cool young gunfighters straight off the cover of Bad Baby Butch Vogue

Independence Day

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Not long ago, Owen the Second showed her a skull. He kept it in a brown cardboard box in the top of the closet. "My first wife," he said, and sneered, his lip bunching up around a scar just under his nose.

Dr. Doug

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When I got that brain tumor I hallucinated this crazy doctor. Dr. Doug. He came into my…

God's Vial

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The porous bear the anchorite’s vial

Istanbul

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They are plastering on lipstick in pay-to-enter toilets around the corner from the mosques, where old men sit on back streets selling toilet seats, spices by the shovel, flashlights, and Audrey Hepburn t-shirts

The Game

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We touch the places now, feel the hardness of bone...

Big Money in Poetry!

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Perhaps you have heard the rumors of big money in poetry Maybe that’s why everybody is writing it these days Even Emily Dickinson must have heard these rumors Myself, I suspected as much 50 years ago And started early to accumulate my hoard of poe

PUISSANCE du PISSANTS

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Not like a Palestinian mother clinging to her baby shot through the belly or the baby clinging to the last moments of life in the arms of his father who, when the life departed, held him up over his head

Books

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It sometimes happens a student remains a friend long after you both have abandon academe.

Strings Go

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This woman is naked to the waist and then nakeder below that.

Drama Days

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And you lean forward and all of that caffeine anxiety rises up in your throat, the pressure in your jaw, a series of weights and pulleys on your teeth and at the back of your mouth. So when you open your mouth to talk, no sound is made, only the sound of

Spiders

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Ten am, and the piledriver behind Rhys's eyes shows no sign of mercy. Beyond the safety glass, caverns of empty air tumble down and out to where the edge of the city is lost in the murk. The figures on the screen pulse and phase with the hideous internal rhythm of his…

Procedural

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Val walks through the world, absorbed in the day to day. A plainspoken narrator drones on in his mind. The nondescript voice marks time to the beat of Val's banal footfall, hums along with the whir of Val's modest, midsize sedan. The narration is loudest in the twilight…

Hypnagogia

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The figure eight will fall on its side. Become infinity.

Winyah Bay

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Effie reckons the river her sister keeps asking about, the Great Pee Dee, was named after some Indians.

Big Trucks

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"Pull around," Rachel says. "Pull around him, dammit."

Wattle and Daub

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~ ! ~

Tia Alvarez

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Penny followed the woman into the warm, dark interior of her home, which smelled strongly of cumin and other familiar spices she couldn’t name. Penny noted that the tia’s hair had turned almost completely white and had grown very long since Penny had last