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Mr. Pickle and Mr. Peet

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We got a sandwich at Mr. Pickle's, but they cut the sandwich in the plastic. Plastic wrap.

Joe's Sniff Shack

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Joe's, always smelling of cherry chapstick or the breeze that comes up from subway grates, used to service some of the finest dupes in town.

How To Laugh and Be Happy When Not Drinking

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That is the question, not to be or not to be Life, death, whether to be, all that is superfluous in the face of laughter and how to achieve it under extraordinary circumstances like not drinking anymore I’m afraid not all the alcoh

The Fetishist

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Sex is a fetish war -- a battle of trinkets of desire

Swords of Rome

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Rome and Carthage wage war as Hannibal crosses the Alps and invades Italy. With him, he brings an army of barbarian hordes hellbent on reducing Rome to ash. For one young Roman soldier, Gaius, he is trapped between his loyalties to the republic, and to hi

Recipe for the Broken

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This poem first appeared in “Walt’s Corner” of The Long Islander, founded by Walt Whitman in 1838.

The Sound Of...

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What if Everything I have been doing Hasn’t been heard By anyone?

Of Dreams that Dance and Die, Before the Drums

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At eight o' clock: as, drawn by many bells, The patchwork congregation lopes and stalks, To churches far from serenade of shells To storms, we leave behind the windblown walks, And sails of youth, to glide through liquid hells, A temporal…

Unsent

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this is where we end -- the exorbitant eye of forgotten days.

The Creator of the Nipple

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Speaking of stiff nipples, I heard you once wanted to become a painter, because of your fondness for nipples. Feeling like Gauguin and his little Polynesian women/girls, are we? So, you're going to try to out-paint God, are you, Mr. Sistine Chapel of the

A Bad Year

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It's been a bad year, People dying. Some too close to home, Some too far away. I cry down to you, In your casket, and think you might sit up. You were not sick You went in just a moment, Looking stunning and alive. Not…

A city in the forties

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Along the hollow center

Worn

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

Threshold

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But we proliferated back

Abyss

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When Lois finally found him down there, Johnny was wedged between a large rock and the trunk of an old, long since fallen, cottonwood tree. She said as she got to him, she heard his gurgling breath, fighting fiercely to stay alive. When she saw the deep, gathering, red…

You Pour Vodka In Your Coffee

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I wonder if she is my real mother, if I could get one of those paternity tests and find out if she’s my real mother and if the guy she told me was my father was really my father. I can’t remember him very well, just a lot of him screaming and hollering an

Bedtime Stories

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I want to read a story that ends unhappily ever after: one where the bad guy wins and no one gets the girl.

Sit Down, Here.

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“The window is a much better place to read,” she said.I wasn't aware she was talking to me, at first. In my typical manner, I was thinking about far off possibilities and realities completely detached from my own. Yet, here she was, a far off…

Parsing We

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An excellent plan. Just like old times.

What Keeps Us Awake

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On Friday evenings they play Scrabble, a whole crowd of them. They use books to keep score, page numbers, instead of a long column of pencil scratches. They organize themselves into teams; the English majors all together, versus biology, history and horn players. She and he…

Invoking Fire

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We talk of his time in the jungle.

Afterworld

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We suffer// the one agony only- of having no longer/ any physical effect nor way to speak/ of what we watch to those we watch.

You Shine Brightest Under the Starlit Sky

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You shine brightest under a starlit skyThe moon reflects your beautyAs the wind sings your name sweetlyIt was under the heavens that we promised togetherThat I'll hold your hand and you'll be mine forever... You glow brightest when the sun is at its highestYour radiant…

The Fact of the Matter

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Jeanne and I were married for eight years. I never knew her.

Inside Out

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Who hasn’t at some point of the day wanted to dredge up everything in your pocket just to see what it is.

Five Million Yen: Chapter 56

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—Can you handle a threesome? said Isabella.

Beautiful Are the Feet: Part One

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Naomi hadn't expected them to come in such a big box. When the UPS man tried to hand it to her, she told him there must be some mistake, but then he pointed to her name¾NAOMI BROWN¾right there on the top. When she finally got off all that tape, she had another…

From Your Lips To God's Hearing Aid

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God’s hearing aid is missing And apparently needs an enormous battery But no one has the heart to tell Him because who wants to be shouting at God?

Helpless

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She stiffens and blusters and roars Not like a storm, Not like a lion. Like a badger, caught in the steel jaws of a trap.

Triolet

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the magic is our making