1442 9 5
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"Possible candidates for reading to a crowd"
the subject line of the email to myself read.
You see, writing can be hard -
or writing can be easy.
But writing for a crowd you'll see is something else entirely.
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144242
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I was in life, in my dream. I was feeling around underneath your clothing. My fingers were shining in the underwater afterlife of memory, searching for those lovely nipple-sized mollusks. I lived in a land somewhere between the past and the future. Now
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144211
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- Never in pain and distance -
Frown on these moments,
With bitterness and vain
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144110
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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…
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144122
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You have such a complicated mind /
for refusing to believe in God /
just like any damned liberal /
whose fingerprints /
crowd the faces of a thousand /
dollar bills /
being passed around your great nation...
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144198
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Dressed as an English professor on Halloween
I escape the red devil and run downtown.
I go to the Art Car hangar
I dance, I swing my golden brown briefcase
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144111
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A mundane endeavor depicted as a quest. Try it, you'll like it!
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144122
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I may as well have been sleepwalking. Either way, I had no opportunity to admire the moonlight flooding into the long corridors, illuminating the stag heads and painted cheeks of long-dead ancestors.
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144155
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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…
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144121
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I remember sitting there on the first unfinished rooftop, watching you building houses out of words. You hammered in grammar and punctuation; you said these things needed to be hammered in by hand. You drove the long straight exclamation …
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144144
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So for now, let the snow fall, but
let it fall gently,
each flake as a soft piano note
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144185
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144186
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I'm working through the rocky pine cones so you don't have to. I'm stepping over the little dreaming people in your dreams so we don't wake them with our loud and coming loose footprints. The poem passes by like a heartbreaking train…
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144183
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goes on and on. Like it's a sad mad season on Mars, well it isn't, is it? Sometimes I have towonder whatever happenedto us, to make us forget how well we already know how tosing as good as any larks do? I have never wantedto drown, but I've…
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144132
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Being an uncredited bonus composition, written in the sublimest access of divine afflatus this poet believes his lyric verse has ever known. “In olden times, dark was not counted fair”: Those were the words, I think, of some old poet. …
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14411711
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...when they entered eager lungs hungry from deep and sweaty love
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14411710
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It is with great sadness I announce the passing of Ann Bogle on February 28, 2023 after a brief illness. Ann was longtime contributor and editor of these pages and a champion of small press and emerging writers.I knew Ann since the late 1970's when she was an undergraduate…
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1441126
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"You gonna be old before you're old," my father had told her.
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144155
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“Every word was once an animal.”--Emerson This circle has been Broken. The mother has Disappeared inside the wounds Of gunfire like an Eye drop. Who knows if Any of them left, crunched Down, whole into the…
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144121
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He and she are fucking while I watch. She's moaning deep desire and he's pounding flesh into flesh. I'm fully clothed, eyes attune to their fornication, studying. He comes inside of her; their bodies stiffen and then wriggle against one another. …
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144176
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in a willow garden lush shade/drapes dark the young woman's small house/with the lone window, the white door . . .
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144111
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Andrew had learned the art of being a chameleon at school where his school uniform provided an exoskeleton. Beneath was no costume, just the fragile skin of adolescent ego.
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144144
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Sometimes my poems escape. They crawl out through my Wi-Fi connection, I suspect.
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144100
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Osama couldn’t see any reason he shouldn’t retire. No way he could top BP Oil in the Gulf or Pacific Gas & Electric in San Bruno.
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144000
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Azure took the paper and read it herself. She wondered about those four mysterious beings that communicated with her.
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144031
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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.
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144053
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We entered the castle at dawn. The dim light feebly illumined an array of antiques and medieval weapons. Bats dangled from the high vaulted ceiling, enfolded in membranous wings. What were once chandeliers radiating light were encrusted with webs and the ancient wax…
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144086
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At some point we all reach the end point/
of something. Something important/
if only to our fragile self esteem.
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144054
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I find myself in an unfamiliar restaurant, its cuisine an uncomfortable pastiche of Croatian, Burmese, Jamaican and leftovers of long ago Sunday dinners in a small New England town.
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144090
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Sit right down in the chair. It's a glider, see? Smooth and easy movement without that annoying head-swing you get from a rocker. And easy to get out of, unlike a lounge chair. Relax. "Reba" reruns will be coming on in a minute.
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