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Summerset Bangs from Oldtown

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blackberry pie and huckleberry wine and litte Maria with her summerset bangs

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.

Something Going Down, Like a Branch Snapped by Wind

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

Independence Day

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

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.…

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.

Honey Gold

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your light is gonna last me through the week

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.

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…

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. …

Straight to Jimbo

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...coming into that bone yard, you just hang a right, go on past La Fontaine, and take a left a bit further on. Jimbo's right up in there.

Paris Love Songs: Nos. 5 & 6

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Aucune idée

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.

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.

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)...

Skin Wins

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One day, my feet and hands got into an argument. My feet argued that they were superior because they were not only the foundation of my body, but the cause of its mobility. They were modest in size, yet supported and transported an entire body that towered over them.…

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.

Bunker

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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

Aisle Seven

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

Assiduity Twenty

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I experience a presence when walking through the forest . . .

the total compiler

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The idea of an infinite textual universe occurs in many places in the works of Jorge Luis Borges. The contexts and permutations of language, which others had held to be perhaps infinite (allowing themselves to use such an imprecise term), that…

Too many leaves

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This late November day there are too many leaves filling the yard.

Worry Is for the Well-Rested

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I'm in the boardroom, downtown in San Francisco. I don't even remember showing up for work today. I hope they fire me, just like they fired Bill. Well not exactly like that, that was awful. He was caught downloading a phenomenal amount of…

Blood Quantum

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I play in the dirt with cattle bones while Mother rattles the sky. She tells me I have my fathers eyes. The words come through bloody fissures in her lips.