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Flexeril and Hydrocodone and Want

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Flexeril and Hydrocodon... For my back

Whatever Happens

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When Matthew calls I'm sautéing garlic for the polenta and Joe is squeezing buttercream rosettes from a Ziploc bag onto a spice cake he made from scratch. Or trying to—we…

One Poem, Eight Rejections

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Do you suppose you could make your female protagonist a salamander rather than a human?

War Nurses and Lost Fathers - For Memorial Day

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I have been mother to a hundred soldiers, holding their hands barely knowing their names

Place de la Revolution

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We are a funny story, my brother and I. Twins of Africa in a kitchen on wheels the size of a cupboard, we serve tourists baguettes and pain au chocolat, in the gardens adjoining the square where the tricoteuses did their knitting, heads were chopped and..

Unlock the Door, Open Your Heart and Surf the Rifting Singularity

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1) Tragicomedy set to drama is what the American public fears and abhors. But it's reality, and reality can be subject to the rifling burden of…

The Freelance Assignment

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You wanted to be a writer. Now you’re a writer.

Traces in the Winter Sky

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Exhaling slowly and deeply, Tyler settled his back in against the saddle of the tree's broad trunk and let it all go.

The Riddle of Steel

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This is my motorcycle. There are many like it, but this one is mine. My motorcycle is my best friend. It is my life. I must master it as I must master my life. Without me, my motorcycle is useless. Without my motorcycle, I am useless.

Sleep and Poetry

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It’s that, really, nothing else could be Sleep and Poetry, Mr. Keats

Little Meadow Simms

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"I looked at this skinny, little female child, Meadow Simms. It wasn't only that she was small. Meadow Simms didn't look like other children. Her parents were hippies."

Drinking an Orange Julius While Listening to Pink Floyd

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I was strapped for cache

The Accordion

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If I play my accordion too loudly while you're painting, you complain. You stamp about in your room under mine. You fetch the broom from the closet and use it to thump vehemently on the ceiling. I feel the vibrations through my feet.

Keisha

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Keisha was the name she gave us. She said she had no father and no last name. We wrote her down as Keisha B. We already had a Keisha A. She was about twelve though she told us fourteen. Her eyes were older than we dared think. We knew her mother had been murdered and that's…

Magnificent Pigs

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I retrieved the book from the middle of the room and set it in front of her. "Look," I said. "If we open the book up again at the beginning, Charlotte's alive. She'll always be alive in the book."

Skype's Not for Losers. Really.

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More Child Fear

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Women with tremulous breasts. Going down the swimming pool drain.

Fiction with Teratoma Preserves

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In Nebraska, we found a dead man lying between the furrows of a field. He’d been there awhile in the heat and the sun, the only shade provided by a cloud of flies. The dead man lay on the ground, decaying, disappearing into the dirt:

Night Wreck

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You were watching TV when it began. That much is obvious, since you have always watched TV on Thursday nights, and Thursday was when it began for everyone in Polisville. Around 11 PM, a train on its way to a Nevada landfill jumped the tracks. It's a secure landfill, and the…

Poppies

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I was born upside down, the umbilical cord looped twice around my neck. My mother claimed she was so busy working the swing shift at the hospital that she didn’t even know she was pregnant at first. But I found this hard to believe. Of course she knew. My

The Blue of Milk

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She said this is our abode and it sounded like a warble and she made a sweeping gesture with her arm and the boy started to cry.

The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson

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Mighta been a fake.

Into the Wild Blue Yonder

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Then it got quiet again, the kind of quiet that fills a car even with the radio on and the highway ticking away and the corn flying past regimented and silk tasseled.

Po-cash

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“Black is up, red is down,” I said, knowing he turned to pleasant memories of lawbreaking when he felt discouraged. I asked him to meet me for coffee. He said he hadn’t bought a coffee in a year.

Day Care

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"This is where the children play," the woman said cheerily. She gestured toward the flat bed of a pickup truck. The edge was surrounded by a makeshift wooden fence that looked like it had been made out of old orange crates.

Tastes like Wind

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Sand underfoot.It's raining I say …

Bread

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Zach lifts his glass. “Look at us! We eat like kings. Kings!”

Sealing off the Exits

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Jasmine invited herself over and plopped herself on my futon. "Let's fuck," she said, bluntly. "I want to."

Boba Fett Blues

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So you want to know my earliest realization that I was just another boob consumer? Trace it back to my Star Wars Action figure days. Fish out the collapsible C3PO from a war-torn pile of crummy Jawas and Storm Troopers, no they're all out of Snaggletooth

Night at the Reservoir on Airline Drive

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Del and I watched my brother toe his way to the edge of the cottonwood branch that arched over the reservoir.