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Messages from Upstate

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My eyes are wide open. I look like a graphic novel. My world is black and white. I’m poorly drawn. All sounds have an exclamation point.

Independence Day

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It’s Independence Day. But I’m not feeling independent.

Linear A

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let’s press our words into the clay/ in language so completely dead/ we have to re-imagine it.

Building Houses Out of Words

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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 …

Word Burglar

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Oh my god - A plagiarizing pony - I know someone must have said that before

Zombies In The Time of Nineteen Eighty-Four

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I was watching the bustling crowd below, sipping on a teacup full of Victory Gin when the scream, no a howl, cut through the murmuring of footsteps and telescreens.

Esmeralda

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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. …

Memoir 2.4

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He invited her in for a Martini and she graciously accepted.

Voyeur

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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. …

thank you, for everything

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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

Paris Love Songs: Nos. 5 & 6

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Aucune idée

Breaking Point

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I can do the hot coals, no problem. Or, your love, eyes closed. Or your sneer, spank, suffering, resentment, rejection.

Between Love and Hate

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“There is a fine line between love and hatred.” This was what his closest friend, Bob Sanders, had said to him many years ago. And it had finally and irrevocably proven to be so.

Something Going Down, Like a Branch Snapped by Wind

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This is 57% of middle America, I'm convinced: doomed.

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…

The Color of Sleep

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Have you ever seen a body of words give birth to a paragraph? I won't lie. It's a little gross. But quite moving. First there is the biology of reproduction. A blackbird living in an electric guitar, for instance, and its inexplicable urge to mate with an elephant.…

Rest

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What do I understand? What have I mastered or come to terms with?

Distance

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We must sometimes see the world/ as the pale blue dot// surrounded by brighter dots/ and that endless field of darkest dark.

Transport

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Ruth carries always a small bottle of nitroglycerin; and tissues, wads of tissues; two Tums (for calcium, she tells me)...

How To Find A Galaxy In The Dark

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I don't know what I'd expected from the week of mourning after my mother died but I sure hadn't pictured this marathon cocktail party. Our house is packed with people, food, booze and borrowed chairs. People I haven't seen in years keep turning up with casseroles.I'm…

Eternal Return

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When I slip through the seams I return to the same place.

No Homo

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We were talking in the dark in my room. He lay on a mattress on the floor. He came for a sleepover.

Dumb Luck and the Fall of Empires

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At some point we all reach the end point/ of something. Something important/ if only to our fragile self esteem.

Aisle Seven

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A young boy, breathing heavily from running, stopped at her feet, barely able to speak,

Four, in the Morning

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We’d told her that Kasey waitressed. We talked about it a lot, trying to figure something out. I wanted to be honest with her. Kasey said she was too young to understand. I said that was why honesty wouldn’t hurt anything. Kasey said what about later.

The Sorry March to the Even Sorrier Sea

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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…

Whither Butter Sculpture?

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Would we have been satisfied with a humble butter sculpture of a cow in 1960? Puh-lease! Would Parisians of the Impressionist era swoon over a big-eyed child picture?

The Judge's Wife Part 6

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—Strip down to your shorts. Put on this gown, open to the rear.

A Bead Was Lost

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Still Dancing b/w Smokey Conversation

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an engine stalls out in the parking lot the driver tears her skirt coming through the door