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Fats

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It began the night my parents took my brother and I to see The Vikings at the drive-in and the trailer for The Girl Can't Help It came on the screen, introduced by the completely acceptable Tom Ewell, which the folks could swallow, he was one of them, but as soon as…

A Session With My Poetry Coach

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“Please excuse the form letter, but due to the volume of god-awful submissions that we receive, we do not have the time to crush the spirit of each writer personally.”

Five Million Yen: Chapter 55

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Zoë’s divorce lawyer, Arno Aghajanian (“Double A” to his friends), sat at his desk in Los Angeles reading a copy of the Hollywood Intelligencer.

this isn't what i was trying to write, you ass

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sometimes it's hard/ to leave the house in the morning/ when bed is so comfortable/ and you're so far away.

Two Brothers

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They run nonstop for weeks. Between traffic stalled cars. Down forgotten subways tunnels drilled long ago in the cold earth. Past burning sugarcane fields.

My Alice

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My story begins where so many have ended, strapped fast to a cold table, just moments from a lobotomy needle and anything resembling the man that I am.

Trompe l'oeil

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After her grief had subsided, the wife felt immediate relief. / Suddenly she was free to abandon or pursue loneliness

Them, Not Us

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We hold fast to the bed’s corners, afraid our bodies, these new old bodies, have forgotten how to love in its center.

Head Over Feet.

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And if I lived a thousand lives...

To The Little Mouse Who Started Feeling Slightly Nauseous

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I heard them praying to some god none of us had ever heard of. I'm glad I went to the funeral and still have the yellow rose that I did not throw into his grave. At some point you have to stop nibbling from the moldy cake.

A Broken Frame

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The photograph has no date,but these are my long-ago kin,ancestors just before the boat,six stone-faced on the English shore,sepia on cardstock under glassstill clear in severe, dark clothesexcept one who has been markedout, maybe with black wax,which runs to the bottom…

Be Afraid

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Everything conspires to kill you:

For Irony

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They all knew he had cancer before the doctors gave the final verdict. His wife wept and his parents held him tightly. It was a dreadful time for all. Out in the hall his children looked on with fearful faces and shook their heads as he begged them inside with a…

Something Going Down, Like a Branch Snapped by Wind

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This is 57% of middle America, I'm convinced: doomed.

Koo, The Queen of Nowhere

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Koo ate the sad, bitter pills just so she wouldn’t have to try and make small talk about La Donna’s deformed, retarded kid.

Come Monday

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“Have the cousins arrived?”

Found Out

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The other day my friend, Donald, said Shirley always tells him she loves him and she probably does in her way, but it didn't comport with what he walked in and found her doing again last night. She was back at it, hunched over her computer, having chat sex with the…

riversong

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pulled the wool off my head found i was almost dead

Flying

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I gazed into her soft eyes. I was a little scared. This...this meant something.We'd "accidentally" played footsies and I could feel my lonely feet finally touching the floor."Please listen carefully to these safety instructions — even if you are a frequent flyer…

Icehouse

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It was noon and cloudless when I pulled over next to the icehouse, wedged in the X formed by two dirt roads.

Well Enough Away

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Everybody knew the buildings were trying to kill us.

Long Division

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This energy said, "Fuck it, I am going to be the fucking sun." In it’s language it sounded more like "Khershhhhhhh Hhhhhhhhhhh Zirshhhhhhh."

Right in the Back

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I loved baseball and still do, but if you saw me at eleven years old you would not mistake me for that kid over there, the one with even an ounce of talent. Mine you’d measure in atoms.

Duck for Dinner

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My friend and I were once walking the aisles of a supermarket because we decided we were going to have roasted duck. We didn’t know how to cook, but as the old Filipino reds used to say: If not now, when? If we don’t learn how to cook now, as in NOW, then

Do Not Spank the Truth

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Do not spank the truth Whatever else you do You do not ever Spank the truth If you let the truth be spanked You will be diminished And it will never let you Be finished, instead When you are dead You will dangle in the land Between

creation

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Leaving another seemingly pointless day at the office. 4:55pm. Winding through the office parking lot; turning right onto SE Convenience Blvd; inevitably pulling up to a red stoplight at the Orlabor intersection.My windshield is dirty. Speckled with thrown-up slush from…

Me and Not Me

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Is there a homunculus in my brain guiding everything like the pilot of an airliner?

Museum Story Listening

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A sort of invocation of the open sky, in contradistinction to the dark of the Earth whence came the specimens, a figurative marriage of the literal darkness of exploration and the figurative light of knowledge.

Grandma's Fingers

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her hands twined up, as carved from stone, each to fit the other.

In the Faraway Places

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It was far away and I don't know how we arrived. There were people about that were involved in getting boats into the water or else playing sports games atop green hills. They told me I should go out in a boat with this guy and that he would take me around the island. I…