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Silver Spring to Phoenix

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Vibrations of a cavern a mile beneath silver willows.At two in the morning beyond the Sheratona lumination of pollution intercedes realism.Cardinals and doves develop their melodyprogressively caught in beat/heart echoes,as with spelunker canaries fluting noxious gasa small…

How Would Jesus Drive?

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Contemporary persecution of Christians takes on milder forms of torture like having to explain away something Pat Robertson said, or constantly having to hear about Fred Phelps picketing funerals because he happens to hate homosexuals.

Picture Window

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You call your wife. “Do you see what I see?” you ask.

The Nature of Things

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She’s not coming today. She didn’t come yesterday either.

from: The Great San Francisco Poetry Wars

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I got on the Greyhound Bus at 11 a.m. and sat by myself staring out the window. I could see the reflection of my own dark beard in the window, a 27 year-old man with a huge poem bursting my heart, gasping to get out into the bright lit-up world out there,

Jack Arnfinn

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... and the train pulls up and my shadow from yesterday steps off, and I'm standing on one leg balancing just like the weather between winter and spring, I hear a siren and my heart races, I'm about to step aboard when I hear footsteps behind me and two hands cover my eyes…

Seasonal Poem

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One of the poems in my collection, One Day Tells its Tale to Another, published December 16, 2012. Available on Amazon. My first book!

Assiduity Two

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I'm old enough to be her father.

Geode

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There is a rock somewhere with the truth of the sky in it, the glitter of otherworldly charms that falsify the ugliness of the literal.

Crazy Eyes

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The kid with a testosterone chip Instead of a brain

What I Am

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I am a happy cog

Larry's "Gonna Die" Parrtayye

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When we started plans for the party, none of us wanted Larry to die, most of all Larry himself. Actually, when we first started plans for the party, Larry wasn’t dying.

Text Adventure

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Twenty-two tornadoes tore through Toronto, spiraling steel and stone to the streets where she stood, texting her best friend.

Express

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Once, asked what time it was, M. replied, "Eternity."

match point

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two roses her eyes aqua-blue no, blue-green

Assiduity Six

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"Every generation is a new generation, isn't it? What's so different about your generation?"

Bloodsport

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At last one of the men on the line bowed his head in a silent prayer for deliverance from what was about to come, then lifted his head and shouted loudly for his fellows to charge.

Our Merchant-Ivory Weekend

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“A shibboleth is a test—a way to separate da wheat from da chaff that's as old as the Bible, but as new as the latest trend in men's fashions,” Gus says.

If I Could Locate the Tether that Keeps Me Here I Would Chew Off the Limb That It's Tied To

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She is face down in the snow

The Underlying Order

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“Choices overwhelmed us,” Thomas continued, years later, “like waves crashing.”

Chalk, Fish and Monkey

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She picked the fish out of the box leaving a pool of mucus and blood slowly congealing on the shelf and dripped it toward the kitchen table. Outside the wind lashed the tops of the poplar trees together and rain sprayed from the barn roof opposite.

WARNING: I Brake for Plastic Shopping Bags

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"...innocent butterflies of pollution trapped and entangled,"

we're already at the movies

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israeli flares light gaza/ casting incandescent nudity/ upon jumbled puzzle piece buildings.

Meadows

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The whole thing is broken. It's like an egg. I'm not saying this to get you to say something else in the sunny opposite direction of the tattooed scar upon my painted backyard scene. I don't really care. It's only on me. Not on you. I'm glad as…

I Am Speckles the Clown

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Food is silly. Eating is silly. Yet the camaraderie of sharing a table is not silly. It is sacred. It becomes silly when the jello arrives.

Five Million Yen: Chapter 8

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He finished the omelet and started in on the short stack. He drowned the cakes in syrup. -Never can have enough syrup.

The Shadow People

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Two summers later, the ritual began. Carol left her house at midnight, having served her husband and daughter a heavy dinner that left them caged in their sleep. She was like a thief working in reverse: she rose from bed with her husband’s first snore,

Six Tiny Memories

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I took a lover on Ibiza either because he was clean-smelling or because he had a hotel room and there were none to be had.

Mississippi

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“I won't live here,” Beth said, waving her hand to indicate the small Southern town in which they were having dinner—the most delicious fried chicken either of them had ever tasted—in a restaurant located in an antebellum mansion. She looked…

A Little Load of Paint

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Cézanne sags during a moment of paint. There is an umbrella in the room whose surface collects his thoughts. Outside, in the rain, the grass and garden smell strongly of spring. Fruit litters the table. Light through the window writhes in conversation with shape and…