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mondays get all the heat

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when i was five or six/ we lived in an apartment/ and every sunday/ i'd lie on the carpet/ to watch squares of sunshine/ crawl across the rug/ while my mother inflicted upon us/ a centuries-long hour of television/ worse than any droning mass.

Sunday Morning Series- 7: Sunday Morning Trifurcation

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Go diddle in the sand// to save some other sinner/ a death of stones.

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.…

The Judge's Wife Part 8

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—You're convinced I'm crazy. I'm convinced you're incompetent.

Oprah's Sister Murdered My Story

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Dear Patricia, You look marvelous. You seem marvelous. You've added wonder to Oprah's life and that's no small feat. But, here's the thing. I was working on this short story about a relative trying to get in touch with O, one of thousands, except, this one, well this one…

Any Given Recent Day

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Ten-year-old Bobby Akins learned that a shotgun shell struck on its brass end with a hammer can indeed take out the left eye of an eight-year-old brother observing the proceedings close by.

The Cherry

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He then spent his walk home to his single apartment spitting up various textures of red, combinations of cherry and blood mostly.

the global obscenity of your monthly $100 coffee habit [revised]

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My sixth grade teacher used to tell us all the time about how being poor is nowhere near the same as liv­ing in poverty.

All Men With Well Trimmed Beards

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Or, do my own red flags counter balance his. My back and forth, my restlessness, my one foot out the door, my ‘once a leaver… always a leaver’, my pitter patter for a former flame... peppered with my transgressions, my mistakes. Or, worse, the way I have

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.

Five Million Yen: Chapter 56

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—Can you handle a threesome? said Isabella.

The Dead

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The dead want you to calm down.They are quite fine, and don't needyour post-mortem tears, the flowers and veils; their names mispronounced by preachers. None of your catechisms will do -- especiallyfor the children, who know them well and need no…

Firefly

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Smiling at stones and chunks of earth pounding in...

A Philadelphia Story

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In the summer of 1963 I went to Philadelphia to study with a member of the Philadelphia Orchestra.

It's Part of the Plan

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...and on the eighth day

Tatters

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inside i know my heart rattles cause outside i'm only seeing that the truth is in tatters

the heart would have unnatural reverence

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The heart would have unnatural reverence, exalted, bursting with evil, rolling in sloth, if it did not at once reveal its innocence. I saw you again, on the morning of the sun. It was you, or your double, or a son you might have had. Your beautiful bloo

Sick Day

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Marcy was not herself today, her mother said when the school called. She was under the weather and she could not play with the other children. Marcy's mother began to suspect that her daughter was not herself very early on that day. Walking up the stairs Dolores…

On Women

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She was prepared

Cymophiliacs: you are one.

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Let me guess. You're reading this because it's dark or there's no surf or you're at work dreaming about surf or you're broken in some way that prevents you from surfing. If I'm right, you depraved little human, then you have come to the right place. Here we…

Water, Not Fire

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I'll still want the blinds open and the lights on, to see the papier-mache of our flesh fighting death away to the century mark, even if you only want to live until a ripe eighty-two.

Forbidden Music

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There are songs I know to not listen to when I am alone.

A Life of My Own - 3

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My father seems anxious about my gender orientation. I grew up looking like a boy, acting like a boy. He bought dresses and girly stuff for me but he avoided making an issue of it until recently.

surrogate

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the vigilance that informs a parent's every hour had momentarily lapsed

Quarter-turn the Quaternion

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One could count fifty moons hanging in the sky, in rows and columns of smaller skies.

PAPA'S TEARS

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Darkness was fast approaching. I stuck out my tongue at Naya, and she reached out as if to grab…

A Year and a Day Then

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Removing the deeply embedded jack-blade frommy naked side, like any slicked-upsplinter, was just a bit jarring on the first bite, on first try, I must admit. I freelydo so now to your frozen-over faces. You made your…

Twilight of the Trotters

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Neither you nor I is old enough, of course, to remember that America’s most popular athlete once was a horse.

The Finding Smile

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My mother gave her all to convince him to be a politician. My sister begged on bleeding knees for him to give her head. I just needed somebody to help me find things.

FWA (Fiction Writers Anonymous)

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Sebastian and Janice had been a natural match. They sought to deny this at first because a recovery assistance program was not a place to forge intimate relationships. It worked out wonderfully in Hollywood, but Hollywood, as everyone knew, was just a facade. So…