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henry

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her skin was delicate, fragile, that old woman skin that appears to be translucent.the rip caused by the knife opened it up like tissue paper. blood welled for a moment, then poured out with real purpose.this was the delight he found in old ladies.. the scent of their…

Strange

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Words are looking ever so strange today like a hole in space a wind in a cloud a face superimposed over a mountain

Dry Tuna

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"If you don't like it then leave!" Sally screamed.

Separation

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The increasingly furrowed lines on his forehead made her stomach clench.

Life Among the Epiphytes

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Have you ever seen anyone die? It will alter your life. Because you suddenly realize that anxiety was worth something after all, and was a coin of the human condition, imprinted with hectic symbols, some of which resemble cypress, others more like Frankenstein:…

Little Oddities

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The energies align to compel you,/ wave by field, charge by pulse, into/ an ever increasing circle of speed

Ben Clarone: Prologue Part 2

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This was not the bar that the artist usually frequented.

The Weird Gods

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"The weird gods climbed down from the moon, past low-hanging clouds and upon leafless treetops. Their unusual boots first touched ground in a parking lot in the city. The snow crunched."

Tendencies

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Will he do it with a gun? If it’s a gun, will it be a short one, shaved so he can hold it against his head. Will it look like the photograph he showed me, black and brown. I told him he couldn’t possibly buy something like that from a Walmart.

Measures

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Pascal would let something slip now and then. He was sharp and spoke excellent English, with a beautiful Spanish accent. He corrected speech among the guys, but he exercised his lessons in grammar with an eloquence that fascinated all of us, not letting a

Imagining the Reading as Effacement

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What the spaces say// can be heard in the short/ and longer silences

The Bachelor's Hymnal

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OhYou like quiet nights in?I do tooBut we might not get alongbecauseOnly part of youwants silence

Where's Waldo?

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Over his usual ham sandwich and skim milk for lunch Uncle Waldo used to always say, “Going out in the dead of night without a flashlight is dangerous.” But I knew what I was doing. After dark, I'd slip out and sneaker on down the path to take a dip in a…

J.D. Salinger's Toilet Put Up For Auction

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Everybody will be talking about it on campuses across the country “Hey! You’ll never guess who’s toilet I bought. I’m not shitting you!”

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 …

Worn

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The shirts hanging by the back veranda serve as our memorial to them.

The Kill

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I kill because I can’t stop. I kill because I can.

i'll give you a large sum of money for finding my kite. thanks.

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sometimes we saw it in the sky. we'd stand on invisible stairs trying to reach it. running like frightened geese. we were going to catch up with it. grab onto its string. pull it down.

Betrayal

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My brother Herb married his high school sweetheart right after completing college. This was a girl named Beryl, whom he'd met originally in Mr. Reinert's marching band at York High School in Elmhurst. I remember one day in particular in the middle of the

The $64,000 Question

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One day over a hardscrabble dinner of gristly beef and lumpy mashed potatoes, his uncle looked up at him and said, “Kee-rist, boy, school’s gonna start any day now. And winter ain’t far behind. I can’t keep you here. We gotta figure out something for you.

Looking Back On the Night That the Easy Went Under

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Where were you the night Katrina destroyed New Orleans? Oh, what a night... A week later, most of the city was still underwater, with hundreds or thousands of folks presumed dead, and tens of thousands…

Exquisite Now

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In the exquisite now, I feel everything around me, in me, before and after, I think, I should call you, say goodnight, but I do not, choose instead to write this poem, as though I can capture the magic of what is happening between us in words, A…

Scene at the Courthouse

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Realization of one's ongoing decline. Not a bad thing.

All About the Guns

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Been looking for guns. His guns have turned up missing. He’s been looking for the guns. Looking for guns. The au-pair must’ve snuck back in And took the guns. And the baby. The baby must be crawling off with Guns again.

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.…

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.

Over simplifying the solution, or, there have been way too many celebrations at the confetti factory

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Try and put my bones back in

To See Who's There

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Able to search through centuries, I click, scribble, skim,resurrect wet stone walls, the smell of burning peat.Bob's your uncle; Peggy's your aunt.Name your family, child. My brother said helloto Uncle Shirley and Aunt Greg. I was more…

Mississippi Jesus

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"How the fucks he drivin' like that?"

Visitation

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We sat up in bed. It's ‪two o'clock‬ in the morning. Blinding circular flashlight beams probe through the half pulled shades. Magnified black silhouettes of men's torsos lumber back and forth in the yard. We are in a fishbowl and being invaded.