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Amtrak

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She had liked her new husband's sternness, and the way he ran his hands over her body, noticed every inch of it, made her feel not invisible.He traveled during the week, wore cufflinks, worked out in hotel gyms. On the weekends, they redecorated her house and tried to…

How To Write a Poem

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an EZ How to Guide in 50 simple steps

Your Love Life

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Maintaining a healthy love life requires effort and professional advice, and Your Love Life columnist would be happy to assist you.

Swiss Miss Index

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Rye goods * Cracker brot: best practices * Recipes: never embellish! * Boughten: what to avoid

Bookmarks From Hell -- A List of Unsavory, Alarming and Downright Nasty Things Librarians Have Found In Library Books

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Why would anyone stash a used condom in a Bible?

That's It

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I am heading to work. It's early and Clare is still asleep. When I hit the breezeway I realize that I forgot my keys. I walk back into the house and start rustling through the junk on the table by the door. After a moment I sense someone standing behind me and…

The Jaws of Life

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You’ve known her since grade school and even though you’ve never copped a feel, it gave you a strange chill when you heard boys talking about her breasts, pressing against madras or chamois with some devilish life force, or how one day she’ll fuck l

Haiku Haiku, Fattened Feral Kittens, Hobgoblin Test

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and watch the bird play and squirrel play/ and the twitching of cottontail noses

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

I Should Not Have Rushed You Through The Rain

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Mist falls from the opaque sky and splatters crystals in your hair...

Secrets and Piles of Money

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The dog awakens at the sound of a petal falling, sure that barbarians are at the gate. She opens wide her yellow teeth.

Chicken

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Puddles—not his real name, as you’ve probably gathered, but the kind of nickname a fat kid got tagged with in our neighborhood—kept stopping short, picking underwear out of his ass or taking a breather. This had the unfortunate byproduct of my crashing in

Table Thoughts

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“You should've let him drown,” she once told me. Doesn't she see that I did? I'll let her drown, too.

Weight

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We flew./ In my dreams, I can fly.

When Not Laughing, Fortuna Only Smiles

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. . . a visitor from the preceding century would have been aghast to the point of vomiting to behold the regard with which pandas were now held almost universally.

Not Even Know It

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I remember the man well, though he didn't notice me.Even though a million tiny things happened to cause his hand to brush me away from his neck, he didn't notice. Much like the way his eyes bounced off women's bodies as he hurried down the sidewalk in his blue wool…

The Mermaid's Revenge

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Lapping salt beads from/ my crackling, ecstatic lips.

Crack in the Cosmos

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There’s a crack in the cosmos, and pink is leaking through. There’s a crack in the cosmos, fix the sink, the toilet leak. There are many cracks in the cosmos, numerous. This is how time escapes. Good grief, they’re going to suck the cream

The Thousandth Day

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She pictured the President leaving the hospital a few days later, hobbling on a cane. Jackie beside him, Caroline and John-John dashing from a waiting limousine. He couldn’t die. She’d looked into his eyes. John F. Kennedy spoke to her.

The Dream Shop

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From nine at night until five in the morningthe mannequins staff the Dream Shop.Customers sleepwalk in and murmur their enquiries.Some of the patrons are very demanding.They queue outside before opening…

Processes

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How to Boil Water How to Cook an Egg How to Eat How to Think How to Love How to Die

Sushi, Bentham Ave.

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I suggested a threesome for her birthday. In jest, I thought. But here we are; me in my checkered Oxford, Katie in her red silk blouse, as planned. We're at this sushi place at the corner of 9th and Bentham. “Zuma.” I hate this restaurant, to tell you the…

Upstairs on Montague Street

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Benton showed her his old room, a shrine of old posters and records. But it had been cleaned out, made to look like a guest room. “Kiss me,” Benton said. “April.” “That was just a name, so don't get any…

The Man who was followed by butterflies

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They hovered and darted but, after a while, they seemed to be always around him. Lapping at him like the mellow waves that stroked the muddy bank.

The Serious Writer’s Obituary

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...was discovered today hanging from a shower outlet in his bathroom...

Popcorn Tigers

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The last row of furniture is all black leather. In unison the tigers hop onto a couch a piece, sit calmly on their haunches, and reach for remote controls buried in the cushions. Roaring, they paw at the remotes.

Six Down

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“You own your own burial plot, but you don't own your home,” he'd said, and I couldn't help but agree.

Bigfoot Walks into a Bar

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Some claimed seeing him that first time in the grocery store staring in at the pints of Haagen-Dazs, his breath fogging the glass as his head rested against the heavy freezer doors, stinking in his Sasquatch suit. The second time he was…

Nineteenth Century Noise

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The virtuoso tortures a violin/ in homage to Paganini.

Klarheit oder Genug

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F.B.I. then or: "I said later 'for a boob job' and imagined her, a public lawyer, wandering Arizona on foot unable to hide a Playboy-Mansion style rack."