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Road to Nowhere

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I could smell a bold combination of cheap perfume, stale smoke, and sex excreting from her weathered pores. The bus engine hummed as we climbed a winding road. She scratched her neck and tried to finger comb through her knotted hair. I caught a glimpse of

Confessions of a Likeaholic

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"Something happens in a magical, soulful part of the heart...and you see YOU. You see yourself." "I can't look at myself."

Three in a Major Key

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One can watch the grass green/ in response. One can watch the world green/ in response.

Five Breaths Or Less

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She flew through the air, linen skirt billowing around her. Below, her buckled bicycle was taking a different route. Less aerodynamic than she, its trajectory was brief, crashing into the ditch. Elspeth kept on flying. Time slowed, and expanded

Sand Dollars

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“Life is on life’s terms,” she told me once. Her arm, wrapped in clear cellophane, was freshly adorned with a green-pigmented sand-dollar: a living shell.

The Mix Tape

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I made her a mix tape. It was revolutionary. Twenty-two songs she had to hear at least once in her life. I even drew some trippy drug-like designs on the label of the CD to make it seem more real. It was the ocean and the sun and every body of land balled up…

The Creative Use of Meal Time

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We’re more into the punishment that works its way in through the skin and coats the heart anonymously.

Chicken Noodle

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Damn this airplane

From Below

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I can hear the echoes clearly. They are distinct and crisp, almost as though they're all on exact trajectories to me from their final bounce, without any interference. Each sound, while unintelligible, seems to fit perfectly and expectantly into my ears

PERSUASION

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A story about convincing people to do things they don't want to do, written entirely in dialogue; originally published by CHEAP POP.

Epiphenomenal Glider

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Hissing through the opening, the spirits have no place.

My 27th Great-Grandparents

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Early Spring, 1075, Northumbria: Judith, too ashamed to speak, too angry to cry, waves her handmaiden away. She wants no food. Wind drives icy rain across the thickness of…

Aubade Faucet

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I. he leans his messy head against the walland contemplates his wild mistakeshe discovers a nest of red spidersoutside his rotting basement doorhe watches television in his socksand…

By Derangement of All Our Senses

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We will collapse in a storm of images

How Veetzers Set Us Up For the Zorks

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We're doomed as a species. The Zorks are coming to eat us. It all started when Joey Cacciatore, the dumbest crook in the history of the world, got Veetzers swarming like blowflies in 1972, and thereby ensured the upcoming…

The Eleventh Brother, After the Swan

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I turned a maiden to a witch / and back again

The Dock

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Row, Caps of white, A salted escape beneath reflected light. Brother, remember those old lies? I’m off to sea to make those things right, now.

The Dead Horse on CNN

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The dead horse on CNN was floating there in the floodwater

Wall talks to wall

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Wall talks to wall. One has a clock, the other a window, the third a cupboard with bandages etcetera. The fourth a door that opens and closes a thousand times a day.Chair is across from chair. Occasionally the one looking for care picks the wrong one to sit in, and there is…

A Scalar Boson a Day

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. . . the empiricism of the mechanical had wound tight into her, lessons her few calendars could never impart without aid from sundials, hourglasses, clocks.

Speeding on the Highway at 2AM

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I am speeding on the highway at 2AM because no one is here...

Uncle Harlequin

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My Aunt's husband liked to dress up like a clown

Conversations

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That won’t kill me, will it? I asked. Maybe, the doctor said.

T.S. Eliot On His Deathbed

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I guess at the end you’re only looking forward. Or upward actually, since you can only lie there on your back looking upward, straight ahead toward infinity, your mouth in a grimace, with the ghostly pink lips peeled back from the teeth.

Rising

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The coin, so little, the watch chain, the youth, the fading softening speech, each hand and finger, the panic modeled on your own eyes, the ashtray, certain stumps along the way, the long distance, the odd feather, the jazz rope gone,…

SPIN

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Rose lifted her 55-year-old legs until they were perpendicular to the bed and admired how girlish they looked. It gave her the sexy legs of a 20-year old, if the morning light was right and she squinted a bit.

Artist's Statement: Oracle

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Mark Reep is a faded Polaroid oracle taped to the only unbroken window of an abandoned house in Ithaca NY.

Mr. Wazzeldot

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Mr. Wazzeldot has seven legs. He lives very comfortably. He likes to sit by the fire. There's a large cushion for a chair, and in the evenings, he sips his Bloody Marys. I know because I visit him…

The Suicidal Juggler

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The man wore a bowler hat and stood on an open patch of grass, with a pyramid-shaped stack of baseballs at his feet.

Prophetstown

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The elders of the town will tell you that as soon the prophet mill arrived everything went to Hell. Before the process was streamlined, prophets used to be grown organically in the community. They popped up only where the ground was tilled and a prayer was planted. They…