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A Band of Feline Brothers

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I am not covetous for catnip, Nor care where I sleep at night. It irks me not who takes my Favorite chair, or swats me off a table.

Blackish by Reason of the Ice

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"Sara, do you taketh it with your eyes?"

Nearsighted Singers, Your Time Has Come

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An old man in overalls with rags on his head known locally as Bo Peep made his way up from the black side of town to the white. After listening for a few moments, he shook his head in disgust. “Boy, you can’t play them blues.”

Asking an Accomplished Poet Friend to Read My Poetry in a Starbucks at 2PM on a Thursday

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Your usage of the English language / is awkward and passé—

Rex edits an essay about relationships

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...it's about female needs, Rex.

Wallflower

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It was one of those weekday mornings in early spring when Marjorie and I could wander from chapel to chapter house with only security guards for company.

Masquerade

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. . . music and dance, theatrical performance of tragedies and comedies . . . a primeval orientation, celebrating the cultivation of herbs and vines . . . ritualistic use of intoxicants, to remove inhibitions, to liberate participants . . .

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…

After Prometheus

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His method is simple...

A Dialectical Digression

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It performs the dialectic that intertwines real and ideal through her mounting concern about being choked to death then eaten by a very large pig.

Life Sized

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The first time I saw Little Man was on a bright, hot afternoon near the end of November, when the trains had just pulled into the fair grounds and the familiar smell of upturned turf and sun-basked animals returned to Sarasota.

Day 1 of Composing the Second Novel

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The Vote

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God had decided to resign. Not even two weeks notice. He just resigned. Point blank.

The Hound - Part 2

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The temperature would drop rapidly once the sun hit the horizon. I had about an hour before this would happen. I stood and put on my coat. The fire had gone out. There was no smoke...

Haiku for Jogging

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Haiku for Jogging

~switches and shade~

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  mis-placed       the change           she goes looking for.        her folks        missed another hour...          her worth-while spent wasting        the voice wouldn’t leave the leaves alone.

Reckonings

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Even in the fading light, it looked big enough to disembowel a man.

My Brother the Painter

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My father bouncing his leg to slow rock music with me on one knee, telling me I should keep a special place in my heart for my teeth, to remember where I lose them, on the playground like he did when he was my age, fighting a friend named Bobby-Joe. Or else I could lose…

Beach Scene

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Larry works the concession stand / near the pier.

Tarzan on Mars

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Tarzan peers through a telescope. Earth, in its aphelion, is approximately 40 million miles away. A star. He lives alone. He is old. He worries about going blind. Mars is cold. But there are ways to keep warm. He reads poetry. He lets out bloodcurdling…

My Third First Novel

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One of the publishing industry’s dirty little secrets is that first novels sell much better than second novels. So why not enhance your chances for success by calling your second novel your first?

The Sway

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When it was sticky cool at night, he'd pull her hair up off her neck and spin it like a pinwheel. “You could be anything," he would say. “You could be a preschool teacher.” She waited for him to add, “For dragons! For wallabees! For…

Australia (from slushpilemag.com)

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Now Ninalee gets up from the table. She starts to put some snacks in a bag for Janny and Benjie, and some storybooks in there too, to read to them in the park: books about trains, mostly, and there’s one with a bus and one with a car...

I'm Dreaming of a Nihilistic Christmas

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The mind sparkles with Shakespeare. It's like hearing the rain fall. The world becomes silent and dark and the rain becomes snow and falls like snow and rests on the ground like snow and informs the mind with the values of heaven. A distant oboe pins its sympathies…

So long

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Years later he surveys this place again to post something, anything. He plays "sex on fire," sounds that once fueled him. Now he knows the song is about VD, not unbridled potency. Names and words all seem at once familiar and numbing and noise. He once wanted fame or…

The Naming of Girls

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I sneak glances of her unhooking the clasp, taking it off, so that her back is bare, and I can see the muscles, the bones underneath move as she puts the new one on...

The Nude Pianist: A Novel: Chapter 54

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Frank shouldered his backpack, grabbed the leather satchel packed with his brushes, palette knives, pens, and pencils, and exited the vaporetto at the Rialto Bridge.

Hardware Store Tour

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The Plaza had a chess-board floor, green wood booths, and the lights stayed up. I might be combining a memory of Fitzie's in Binghamton. The Plaza felt like a preppy soda fountain with beer.

Letter to John Berryman

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My dad was an Army Reservist stationed in the U.S.—New York and Texas—the bugler in his corps. He golfed on summer weekends at Hazeltine in the course of his career. I had seen houses water colored prettily within the lines on L.S.D., after noticing not

Sarah the Witch

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Secretly she suspected she was really a witch. She didn't have green skin or scraggly black hair, and certainly no flying monkeys. Maybe those came over time, the more bad things you did, the more ugly you became until all the world could see how horrible