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The Nude Pianist: A Novel: Chapter 40

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—Mazel tov, schmazel tov!

TRAUMA

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Everybody breaks. Everything splinters.

Space Program

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Mercury and Gemini disappointed.

Catch & Release: Dog Person Depression

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Instead, I get things like, “Why can’t you find a nice man with cancer or a bum leg?”

Ethnomathematics

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His academic nightmare is set in an examination hall, where the student takes a seat at a folding table in the center of the room.

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 Code of Hammurabi

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We pull up chairs. I breathe in her Bath and Body Works vanilla, read her paper slowly and aloud because the ears catch what the eyes miss. Her sentences are awkward, stilted.

Epiphenomenal Glider

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Hissing through the opening, the spirits have no place.

Flamboozled in the Beak

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I was looking for an inn to get a cup of calf soup before jacking ribs at the mutton joint. Feng calls, running numbers on an engine zone out in the valley.

Sleeping on Route 110

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in the deep dark of a 2 a.m. atmosphere

A Change in Status on the Facebook of Cement

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First he wrote it in wet cement at the intersection: “Tad Loves Kimberley,” with a big heart around it. He was real proud, you could see. But then later on that year, the graffiti began appearing everywhere, on all the store walls: “Kimberle

disparate haiku (mostly)

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faith in gravity/permitted them to extol/the guillotine's blade.

Dead End

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I unwrap my #4, the greasy smell wafting over my nostrils, and I pause, with the understanding that this will be the highlight of my day, and that I should savor the moment, and then I bite in.

A Life of My Own - 4

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"Middle class workers and working class poor and the unemployed will soon be forming a revolutionary movement to break this stranglehold of corrupt elites."

The Night Shore

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Somniloquies rise like the drowned . . .

The Nude Pianist: A Novel: Chapter 31

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I was always bi-polar. I didn’t realize it was a mental illness until my divorce lawyer had the court order a psychiatric analysis.

Souvenirs

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It is a hot August night — the same kind you remember from that summer after high school graduation. A cool breeze blows in off the ocean, sweeping across the boardwalk just hard enough to dry the …

Mother O'Grady's Last

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Christmas night was closing in at the Cantrips alehouse in Aberdeen, a firm favourite for riggers and other men and women who lived life close to the horizon. Sometimes, on a Saturday night, things might get a bit rowdy but Mother O'Grady would stand firm and bring out…

Max & Julia

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I heard the basketball hitting the pavement in the park across the street, right outside our window... I heard it every day in an evenly spaced rhythm, as if it was keeping time, like a metronome on my life...

Arcana Magi Pure Vol.3 - c.1

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Emi stood up and turned to Mayumi. She did not know what else to say. There was a sense of helplessness.

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.

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.

Curfew

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The Houston police devised a punishment for the adulterous thespian that would not hurt the nights or household income of his French young wife.

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,…

Gone

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Erased. Like chalk across my body, a fine powder of forgetfulness, with a few swipes --- all those names and faces, gone. The letters burned.

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…

Greener Than Thou: Saving the Earth, One Smackdown At A Time

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Are you a hostile person who gets into trouble when you express your anger? Would you like to annoy the hell out of people and get away with it?

The Ogontz Branch

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There are stories I will not tell, stories I shudder / to remember. You'll forgive me for withholding them from you. / You may, of course, not tell me everything about yourself either

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.

The Trapper Boy at Work, One Mile Underground

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The coal carts come and go like the seasons, never stopping.