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Putting the Damage On

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My Thursday head belonged to a former Miss Brazil named Rita.

Sort of Like Bukowski, But Completely Oblivious

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My eyes don’t close but hers are shut tight, and something inside tells me that to this girl, I could be absolutely anyone.

Aurora Borealis

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I recalled the one night stand I'd had with the girl one balmy summer night in Minneapolis. We lay on my bed in the moonlight, and I touched the nipples of her tiny breasts with the thumb and pinkie of one hand.

Substitution

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Once there was a man who wrote in code. He was comfortable among substitutions

Prelude to a Love Story

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Slipping into the Sydney Harbour Tunnel like a nocturnal creature fleeing the light, tears stream down my cheeks, spilling from my lips, the pain too great to care about self-preservation. Drunk still, hands clenched, I strain to focus on the world fading into a blur of…

I Wish This Was Fiction

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The convalescent home's common areas are surprisingly well-appointed, given the neighborhood, which makes his actual living quarters that much more dismaying. Poorly lit, dusty, stifling, the room reeks of socks worn for weeks on end. My nostrils burn, and my eyes…

The Nude Pianist: A Novel: Chapter 9

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Michiko stood in front of Steinway Hall on West 57th Street.

The Gallery of Wounds

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The blood is memorable/ as is the copper taste of that/ momentary certainty of lockjaw.

Heron

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. . . nor did mine eye apologize.

The Torture Never Stops

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Who is the torturer and who is the tortured?

A Break in the Cloud

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Each had jostled and laboured for his or her place upon the blunt outcrop, in the cold persistent darkness, where the outcrop was merely something that had fallen and not quite been washed away.

I Dated A 50 Foot Woman

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There was no need to drive. She could travel ten miles in ten minutes. She merely had to be careful not to step on any cars or trucks.

FWA (Fiction Writers Anonymous)

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Sebastian and Janice had been a natural match. They sought to deny this at first because a recovery assistance program was not a place to forge intimate relationships. It worked out wonderfully in Hollywood, but Hollywood, as everyone knew, was just a facade. So…

Seeing Me

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I got to see me the other day.

Love's Hinterlands

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Sit down at night and stare into the fire. Consider if Cupid is just another liar.

No Good Hubcaps - song

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I got no good hubcaps My van is up on bricks It's held together with duct tape And a couple of crummy sticks I caught the guy who did this And tied him to a tree I kicked him in the windpipe And kicked him in the knee I'm a man witho

Poem in A Dead Language Only I Understand, Translated for You

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I used to be a poet, you know. / Better, in many respects, than you.

Ichthyology

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The doctors said, when she was born, that the gills would eventually fade away on their own. Nothing to fear, they said; no more unusual than the rare child born with a tail, or a dense pelt of fur, or a single sharp tooth jutting from its new pink gums.

Augustine

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You stretch my heart / in sacred ways

a good ending

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It's twilight

Event Particle (9)

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leaves, starlings and other words fall into thickets of orange or green grasses or tendrils or snakes

The Washing of the Quilts

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Sweaty feet, drool from the weighty sleep of mid-afternoon naps, the inescapable perspiration of the South: all combine to create the entwined scent of socks and stale toothbrushes...

As Anti-Vegan Bias Spreads, SaladShooters Fight Back

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The Vegan Defense League is a vigilante group formed to fill the gap left by local law enforcement, who jam the parking lot a mile down the road at a donut shop. “By the time the cops finish their coffee and chocolate frosted donuts, we could be dead.”

Lovelandtown Tavern

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James Hubert III sat at the bar. It was late. His wife and kids were long in bed and he knew he should be, too. But with the Lovelandtown lift bridge stuck in mid-air, a drink beckoned him. He sat next to Vince DeSantos, a small, stout man, with a bowling

Boston Marathon

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As I walked down to the Subway, I thought to myself that now, after the horror in Boston, everybody looks like a terrorist.

Chair and Umbrella, $25

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If white t-shirts are only an SPF of 8, she couldn’t even imagine what a white nylon-mesh umbrella on this godforsaken beach might be in terms of protection.

Illinois Route 3

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If this road could answer I would ask her what it is like to follow the path of the rippleshimmery river for too many miles through the slowly ghosting towns and the corncovered landscapes of the dying Midwest

Vanishing Point

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the two become one where/ all things end,

On Clearance

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She clutched her fat rolls and tugged on a pant leg. "I'm so embarrassed! You caught me on a bad day!"

Sorry, Charlie

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Vietnam, Tet, and beaucoup Charlie