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Warning! Please Read this Before Adopting a Pet

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One evening I came home late from work to find my wife drinking white Zinfandel by the fireplace in the living room and reading Wallace Stevens poems out loud to the dog, curled at her feet.

you weren't this way

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i was in the fields, i was moss, was sticking my head in the columbine

Famine

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To be perfectly honest, I was lousy at my job. Or at least most aspects of it. The typing wasn’t a problem: I can get up to a hundred words a minute on a good stretch of unbroken text, and I’m pretty accurate. I even edited as I went, fixing passiv

The Date

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Everything was cool until she used the phrase, "five million dollar home."

A Blowhard Drops By

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So, I say, what is the answer? The answer to what? You know. The song by Bob Dylan. The answer is blowing in the wind. You’re the wind. So what’s the answer?

Puddles

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The first inkling that I might be in love with Josie came at our high school senior day outing at, oh, what's its name, state park. I forgot, but it doesn't matter. She smiled, did a little wave and stepped away from her friends, lifted her sundress a little to keep it dry,…

The Fourth Prague Defenestration: 6

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My grandfather rode with the Czar’s army. He was abducted from a village in Austria, trained to pillage and drink, plunder and rape, and ride the best horses that could be had. They were given the best vodka and the sharpest swords. They were all just b

Tatters

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

How to Get Fans For Your Band (or book, start-up, app, whatever)

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You’re finally in a band that can get through a rehearsal without someone strangling someone with an amp cord over creative differences. No one’s in jail, rehab, or MIA from a multi-day booze binge. The group has laid down a few quality tracks that don’t

Tree Yaupon

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They clog the skimmer basket/ and fill the small Polaris bag.

momentary delay

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The clouds cried more than silver tears, this time.

A modicum of madness

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for the moment/ you think you know what you’re/ doing and do it.

Stars and Smiles

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Older than a star I am

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:

The Blue Jay

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His mother hated blue jays, hated them with a passion she usually reserved for no-count trash who drank beer on their front steps and worked on their cars in the street.

Personal Time

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“I”, fuck it. I, I, I, I. It has always only been about me, this voice of mine, indivisibly me. selfishly and pompously. I shall not dispense with the false pleasantries other writers will offer, those writers that say, “Reader, look here, look at the…

The Passed Away

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Died is forever. Passed away/ Is ambiguous. Dead isn’t/ polite.

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…

the first time I met Terry

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I remember the first time I met the virgin, Terry (not Mary.) She was in the back seat of an old Plymouth convertible with its top down, jam-packed with raucous high school girls vying to see which one of them could be the most loud and obnoxious, and w

Jackie Kennedy, Marge Simpson & Longevity: What I Learned From Magazines This Week

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The title of the overdue book returned to a public library in San Francisco 100 years after it had been checked out? Forty Minutes Late.(Readers Digest, 04/17)In 1999, Kathy McKeon, Jackie Kennedy's former assistant, went to a Halloween party dressed in a Marge Simpson…

These Words

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These words are dripping Delaware and these words are eating your eyes.

Aluminum Canoe

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"Don't stab me with that," says John.

Arcana Magi Pure Vol.4 - c.2

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Mayumi and Emi followed Nina through a path away from the shrine grounds. It was narrow, but the plants did not interfere with their progress. Flowers showed signs of wilting, unable to handle the cold slowly coming in.

The Cosmos as Gerunds

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There is no there or where but rather/ trajectories of probability

Suicidal god

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My dog’s on suicide precautions. I had to take away all her eating utensils--even the chopsticks. So now she has to eat directly from the bowl. It doesn’t seem to slow her down.

1940 What I Wanted

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But this ache wouldn't leave me.

Transgressions

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Once you descend, the third rail/ hums its invitation

Quatrains Written on Stolen Time

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It is the fragrance of decay/ as paint, polymers and dyes/ outgas molecules of themselves

Dear A. Lien (Letter Two)

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You’ve got Wikipedia. Look them up: vagina and penis. What Wikipedia will not tell you, however, is the thousands of years of human anguish, and rapture, wrapped up in those two organs.

Prosaic Miscellany

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Some days, you want all the red states to secede