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Esmée

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Esmée sat alone at a table on the terrace at Marina Jack’s in Sarasota. She had been there ten minutes and no waitress had approached her.

Tales from the fictionaut Fave Side

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Into the bowl I put Tales from the Crypt, The Far Side and an episode of Numbers. Wisked for a moment, then let the dough rise.

Myself Today

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Suddenly I'm not feeling it anymore. / Poetry has become insufficient. / I can't do it like I used to.

MOTHER MOUSE AND HER BRATS

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Oh, you aren't going to lecture us, for heaven's sake?

Spittoon (w.c.55)

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“I’m pregnant,” he says...

Beachcomber's dirge

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...clash of gulls wend upwards, disappearing into grey night's high tide recedes

White Room

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A white room is empty but for you, a card table and a chair.

The Winter's Too Warm for Bears to Sleep

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The winter’s too warm for the bears to sleep, and they get up in the middle of the night with insomnia and wander about the streets in their pajamas, knocking over garbage cans, looking for a midnight snack of some kind. They’re getting kind o

One Sick, Two Sick, Red Sick, Blue Sick

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I found a diseased fish / wedged between some boulders near the pier

ice becomes a new marvel

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at all altitudes and at all latitudes / glaciers in furious melt: / both Greenland and Antarctica headed both / to be ice-free isles adrift / and with shorter coastlines amidst higher seas.

Regret

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Regret takes the shape of little clouds ...

The Humanists

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“She’s very sick. She’s dying,” and he smoothed my hair along my neck. “It’s leukemia. A very rare type,” his hand reached my shoulder and stopped there. “She only has a few months.”

The Tamarack Swamps

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Last night, in a tavern called Wits End, we dropped quarters into a console, sized and shaped like an old TV.

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.

Global Arms

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~(+)~

To All the Sisters on My iPod

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It was a wake-up call. A sign that I needed to stop and ask if I was making wise and sensible life choices. My iPod was full.

Take Back the Night

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A woman who is, say, a culinary arts champion or an heiress devoted to literature such as Bryher (Annie Winifred Ellerman) or Peggy Guggenheim might be able to turn me on, turn me out, turn me around.

Flash Gordon in Iowa

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I will show you how, in the spring, the sidewalks here look like a crossword puzzle resting under a glass of lemonade,

Glossolalia

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Method of divination. Open a book to any section. Drop your hand onto the page. Read that there is an exorcism happening in the other room.

Snow

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She talks about window treatments, how the place is maybe too much for one. Wants me to know she’s not much of a cook, and wants me to smell what’s in her oven and compliment her cooking anyway.

The Judge's Wife Part 9

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Suddenly something clicked.

In The Wake

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Any form of exertion would defile what we are trying to do

Archaeology

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I would like to go back (with spade, pick, soft bristles), and sift through time and layers, brush away the intervening years, and find: the tooth, knocked out by my then best friend, when we were seven, careening downhill in my father's wheelbarrow on Boscobel…

Worn

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The shirts hanging by the back veranda serve as our memorial to them.

Gossip

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Gossip Betty Martini divorces husbands when they least expect it. On a seeming whim, she pays a visit to dear Arnold, who keeps her papers handy in his top desk drawer. She initials here and there, signs with a…

Pop Tarts

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The currents of events/ strip the molecules from cartilage,// reverse polarity of ventricles—

July 16

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Last night as a duration spent hovering in electronic media-space.

Ten Books That Have Stuck with Me Off the Top of My Head as I Make Them Up, #2

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#2 The Typewriter Inside You by Harmon Gentle—I found this one at a garage sale when I was 15. Intended as a manual for sharpening one's typing skills, by the third chapter it became obvious that Mr. Gentle's sanity had slipped, and that rather than mastering the…

Fine, she said

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A rope is cleaner, he explains with a straight face. He's calmed by the visual.

Hope's Amanuensis

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I was low on carburetor / oxygen and my fraud protection / had just expired.