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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

Impressionist Modern

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I'd never seen a dead person before, let alone one that was living just seconds earlier.

Puppy Love

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That was the summer that Christine Nelson owned me. It felt like catching the flu. I had it bad. I was about to turn seven, and it was my first time, and it was bad. A love like that, I don’t know, it’s not a love supreme. It wasn’t completely cru

Gorging on a Diet of Words

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After years of unsustainable binge spending and a global economic semi-meltdown, most people have had to cut back on their expenses. Many folks are struggling to make do in this new and bewildering economy and we are all learning to live on our means, rather than beyond…

Terror From Above

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A shadowless torpedo shaped form plummeted from the grey, overcast skies upon the many unsuspecting. No remote pilot thousands of miles away guided this particular descent. 

Fear in a Handful of Dust

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I fear my personal information travels the World Wide Web/ and mad Ukrainians will steal my name and wealth./ I fear the fiscal cliff and raising the ceiling on national debt./ I fear a death by taxes.

ROLLING LIKE THUNDER

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The ocean smelled like decomposed plant life and clinically despicable vagina, but I still spoke of its power and my fear of it in moonlit clichés and she still listened.

Zimmerland

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He was just walking along, making sure that no white, Hispanic, Native American or Asian people were doing anything illegal when he noticed the young black man walking down the street. He hadn't meant to.

Danse Macabre

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Each day, they trot the coiffed/ and painted cadavers across the stage.

Surveil

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“I want you to know that you are being watched,” Ernie said. “I have trained a camera on your work station.”

Rocket

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The rocket shone in the distance. Cape Canaveral had never looked so pretty.

If I Were a Chemist, Not Now, but Maybe In The 1920s

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She said, “I think I’m pregnant,” but I thought that the sidewalk looked cleaner than usual,

How To Write a Poem

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an EZ How to Guide in 50 simple steps

"The Misses Moses," from my collection Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives (Norton 2010)

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The Misses Moses by Brad Watson from Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives The Moses sisters lived together, alone, in the fine old brick house near downtown where they…

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.

Monday

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The door shuts slowly to something that’s allegedly mine and it sits there and waits until I come home just like you.

The Tourists

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They acquire him in a bar that is famous for its shipwrecks.

Self Pity

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The army was bulldozing grandmother's house.

Food & Treasure

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She wakes up with rosemary.

Moon Talk

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moonbeams unrecognized language steadies my course

John Doe's Jeans

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In the panic following news of my motorcycle crash, my honey fled the house without coat or wallet, and now, nearly midnight, we don’t even have cab fare home.

Echoes

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...Heroin. It helped them get through the tricks and sucked up their flesh.

Conditions of a Narrator

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Moore doubted, perhaps, that readers could sympathize with a man who had killed someone for a cause or a girlfriend who forgave him. Perhaps she felt that maiming is (not) worse than murder. Perhaps she decided that the story should be about that.

Just Who Does Miller Think He Is?

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This new kid on the block, named Miller, showed up out of the blue one day, while we were throwing rocks and boulders down on this flimsy gray sheet of construction plywood that was covering an open trench in front of a new house on our block. One of the

Never Trust A Thief

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His looks were polished like his shoes, his hair as black. No one would have guessed he made his living as a thief.

Early Tuesday Morning

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The moon hung in the sky, round and pale, under cover of some wispy clouds.

It Seems You've Stumbled Upon My Bildungsroman

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Why yes I began writing this, my bildungsroman, Who is Mitsy Jackson, in spring, 1974 or thereabouts, and thank you so much for asking.

Mon Oncle

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Mrs. L. was sitting on a love seat in her nightgown. She was sitting in a man’s lap....

On Not Having an Affair With a Flamboyant Minor Dadaist Poetess

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It’s just that—well, I don’t know how to put this— With a Dadaist poet a non-affair is the height of erotic bliss.

Beneath the Light of an Exploding City

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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