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the memories return like they do every year at this time
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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!
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Past the pavilion, past the factory, past the underside of the bridge where the surfers jimmy their sloppy fingers over the oil barrels.
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The boy heard loud barks and squeals, climbed on a chair, and looked out the window at the barnyard and the faded blood red barn.
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Under the darkness of their new city. The heave and moan of structures as they breathed and pulsed. Under the darkness of this city, under the hum of their florescent bulbs and the tumbling rattle of motorcars, the wheeze of their machines and the clank o
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When our kids were very young, my wife and I believed it was important to give our children traditions that they could grow up with. One such tradition that we shared each Thanksgiving was to walk down by the cliffs along the ocean. We'd all go, our kids…
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I was raised in a big city in the slow South. I know a little about cross cultural dining and where Delta Blues collides with Sly Stone, Al Green, and Zeppelin. Dirty rice in the Dirty South. Fried chicken, collards, and pintos. Fried velveeta…
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saw the world was a mess
I did nothing about it, poured myself some apple juice
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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.
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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.
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He repeated these six words like a prayer. His only confession.
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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,
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I must have been six years old at that time, but the events of…
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Everyone loves a story of love
unrequited.
But what about the stories
of the unrequited lovee?
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In traffic I cry bloody murder, but my bloodlust subsides once I'm in Valhalla. Chip Whitehead wants to see me on the 22nd floor before I start my shift. Charlie and the other suits have been looking at me funny since I sent Chip a memo suggesting the recession…
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They are all sleeping, but I know better. I will keep watch and if he comes tonight I will be alert and ready. When he arrives he'll see the slack mouths, the graceless sprawls, hear the grunts, snorts and snores of the other women and then he'll sense me. My eyes will…
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two roses her eyes
aqua-blue
no, blue-green
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I heard this story from my grandmother who heard it from her grandmother who heard it from an uncle, who was a monkey.
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Paulette lived on the east side on Paulette Avenue. Mama dropped me off when we wanted to play Barbies. Her neighborhood was a little green lily pad in a swamp of blight and disrepair. A ghetto moat ringed around those three fancy blocks like a first line of defense,…
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Eddie meets Sarah Packard, a “college girl” played by Piper Laurie. She walks with a limp, a fact Eddie doesn’t notice at first because she’s sitting down at a diner table in a bus station. She’s alcoholic and writes poetry.
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If you're a Boomer, your brain is teaming with decades-old Pop tunes that you just can't forget. The real reason you can never remember where you put your keys? Too many of your brain cells are clinging to every last lyric to “Fire and Rain,” “Free…
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awfully evil decisions upstairs in your head that could come back to haunt you in your later years;I'm here to report your zooming about hair isn't really one of them. You have found the infernal wheel works in all four directions at once. Good for you.…
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By February, I had decided,
That you'd tear out my throat every morning
if it meant your favorite song would play from my neck.
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Twenty-two tornadoes tore through Toronto, spiraling steel and stone to the streets where she stood, texting her best friend.
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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.
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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…
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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…
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He calls it an owl glass: he’s allowed: he’s six.
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He was instantly on her, pulling at her nightgown
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