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M. Nerveux Chronicles: Toad Suffers a Bad Business

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Herr Toad smokin'

An Orb for a Better World

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Max sighed. Solving for x was boring, so mind numbingly boring that he didn't notice the flickering blue light hovering in his room. It crackled and popped, growing until a shimmering rectangle stretched from floor to ceiling.A hand pushed out from the rectangle, and a…

Paradise

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From the rumple of pre-dawn Queens, sure South on 95, to almost Savannah by dark; still cold, but we’re full of what’s coming:

Sleepwalker

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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.

Digging

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I came to a field where, scattered around, were quite a few men digging holes

Dream Boats

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The Inauguration Day Windstorm had blown out half the downtown lights to celebrate its twenty-first birthday. Two old friends flecked with gray snow and white hair sat on the boulders that kept the Sound from sweeping away Myrtle Edwards Park. Look at all the…

What I told the police the morning after

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Miracles don’t happen to the poor.

Scar

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I stared at these meteor impacts, feeling far away, a lone sentient cloud admiring the scoured yet wondrous earth-of-this-girl below me, the lean slope of her side, the soft dip of her neck, the sharp edge of her cheekbone, the monarch wing of her eyelash

our notorious youth

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Be aware the dog is king, radiant, emitting many beams, renewed by and restored by his fullness, his satiety. In many ways underlying all our hearts and minds, out of our notorious youth, ever the flower of our flesh on fire like a little reed next to the dried…

Four Poems

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Our disappearance would register/ as the movement of a sand grain/ on a windy beach full of sand.

Snarket

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Shit, I guess I'm gonna hafta

55 words #5

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"...,beautiful, yet neutral, an oversimplistic reading of the people we meet."

Perilous Joy

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...bush tail beside him his closest comfort next to the genes...

Packing

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I left Iowa in august when the air was thick and sticky. I had been there three years minus a few days when the boy I'd been sleeping with packed almost everything I owned into my car and waved goodbye. In Baltimore I had few friends and a job teaching English at a…

To Whom It May Concern:

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Now, we can argue about how many licks it takes to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop, but there is no doubt that it takes eight spritzes of Scrubbing Bubbles bathroom cleaner, three spritzes of Lime-Away, and then a 30 second spray of Oust to incapacitat

I Am Quantum

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He had a lean build, except, remarkably, his midsection was perfectly barrel-like. As if he kept an alien lifeform in his belly, cultivated by years of Pabst and Yuengling transfusions.

Transgressions

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Once you descend, the third rail/ hums its invitation

sabotage

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people keep trying to get me/ "out of the house"./ they see fun in me, and cool in me,/ and want to spend time with me,/ and i am flattered most sincerely./

When Birds Do Not Fly

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The last chick in the nest

Desert Storm, an Infrared Dream/David Avidan

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Desert Storm, an Infrared Dream/Poem by the late David Avidan On January 17, 1991 I woke up at 02:45 from a neo-surreal dream with a slight not very serious feeling of suffocation a pre-asthma attack instantly stifled with the inhalation of Ventolin an

Intrepid Explorer

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The Intrepid Explorer recounts his travels for the benefit of subscribers to the Magazine of the Museum of Everything

Capital Offense

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They can’t exterminate the poor just yet

Go ahead

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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.

Urgencies

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...it was moving toward me from an oblique angle somewhere behind, steadily, relentlessly.

End of an Arabesque. Degas

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Holding a bouquet of flowers wrapped in a tissue in one hand, a round shape that balances the round yellow burst of light that is her dress. While the flesh of her chest bulges forward and she balances as though in a holding pattern in flight.

before Creation

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Before Genesis, digesting the primordial soup.

The Neighbors

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The first apartment Troy and Lynn lived in was managed by an alcoholic former army officer, who lived in the complex with his wife and teenage daughter. He was a lush who didn't do much in the way of management. Lynn had barely noticed him before Troy moved in with her.…

Deus Ex Machina

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He rolls in unbidden across the stubble fields / Old acquaintance astride a newly booming cloud/ Under sky an alien shade of strawberries whipped/ Her watch stops ticking out the rest of her/ scheduled breathing poses

In the Parking Lot

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Maybe they considered themselves beyond redemption, or maybe they couldn't sit for that long.

Ben Clarone: Prologue Part 2

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This was not the bar that the artist usually frequented.