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Lullaby for a Dragon Baby (for Josephina TuTu Waring)

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Lullaby for a dragon baby who breaks the bough with bottled fists escapes the armored cradle stealing swords from terra cotta men to slash the Ming canopy and loose the butterflies that will free Ho Chi Minh from the fire.

To Christine, Whom I Loved Because Another Would

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She was from Tennessee, with advantages over me. An upbringing surrounded by books and sensitivity.

What You Get

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In moving crowds I plan to break you.

Max Beckmann Poem

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the unutterable things of this world

Sourballs

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Lights of human occupation burn/ in patterns like the growth/ of a bacillus, lethal and prodigious,

Blue Ridge

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...swallowed like a radiant yolk by an epicurean barracuda.

A Small Piece of the Night Life

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It made him feel better to imagine she was someone else, someone he didn't know. This comfort bothered him

Reduced

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There I was at the OPEN HOUSE. It was easy, three doors down. The sign on the lawn said, PRICE REDUCED. The real estate lady said, “Back again? Thinking of buying”? I laughed. There were several couples there. People have…

Pigs Fly

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You are rounded just the way the mountain is, out the window. The sun sets on both of you now. Three of you, I should say: the mountain, and you, and little Frank, who is currently batting my ear because he doesn't want to be named Frank but it's for your dead father,…

Neural Tones

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--"Look at us," she murmurs. "Tristan and Isolde without the adultery." --"Well, you can't have everything." --"No? I heard otherwise."

the fine hair on your belly

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On the beaches in the summer the fine hair rose up from under the material of your bikini and swirled around your deep navel, almost invisible to the naked eye, but not to the mind, which imagines everything funneling down into the center of your being,

Tender Mercies

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After he was wounded in Iraq, Wilson Jenkins came home to Monroe. He had suffered two wounds. The first was a waxy-looking scar on his left leg. A twisting crevice of flesh, it started inches above the ankle and ended on his outer hip. In the field hosp

My First Love Messages Me On Facebook

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He tells me that he thinks he reached out as he needed healing and I wonder if I should diagnose him on the spot, explain what years of therapy taught me about him. I don't. Instead I compliment a photograph of the pot plants he grows, organic,

Our Last Tea Party

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It’s the Tea, stupid. Drink up.

Chalky goes to night school and studies the Classics

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I don’t even want to think about Aethra shtupping Posiden and Aegeus

the dreamer of eggs

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How much sucking, faithlessly, can there be? The body being a night thing off which steam rises, that attracts like a magnet or loadstone, whose curls attract, whose ringlets or tufts of touched hair between the legs glory up the nightly watched miracle,

Allergic Reaction

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On his way to his first fishing expedition in the Bay Area, the man remembered the rustle and shimmer of the willows by the muddied Jemez River in New Mexico, cold beer, the clean camaraderie of childhood friends. He walked along a path choked with greenery to the San Pablo…

"you: the size of"

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The face is made of cracks that move with and from what it witnesses. When I let a thought out, your face cracks too, kind of dramatically. I didn't mean to share it, you press about it though. I think of everyone else who has cracked or cracked someone else and it doesn't…

Announcing Human Season

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Contest rules are simple. Two teams of five hunters each are established by drawing from pools of interested volunteers and selected prison inmates confined for capital crimes and illegal immigration.

About That Leg

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I could have said no. I should have said no. Prudence, however, was not in the air. Fourteen minutes later I am at the door of his condo a few blocks from Pier 39. Twenty minutes later I have wriggled into his extra wetsuit and am following him on his wif

Reburial at sea

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“Sloshes to sloshes. Drip to drip,” I said, then ceremoniously flushed the toilet bowl, our heads bowed in reverence as Molly and I gave Swimmy its last rites. Swimmy, named by Molly whose overstatement of the obvious is endearing in a three-year-old, was…

By Misadventure

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...when they spotted each other through the glass, with he inside and she outside, she quickly began licking her fork obscenely, attempting to exhibit her sexual prowess with regard to the dexterity of her tongue and mouth...

PROMISES

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There was a bird on the windowsill, a sparrow, its silhouette backlit by a view of Uptown. She remembered many sparrows during her forced trips to Mercy Hospital...That was all over now...

A Harsh Pep Talk

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You are nothing but a generic white man with average looks and intelligence, trapped in an indie romantic comedy. You sit in your overstuffed coffeeshop chair, drinking an impossibly befoamed cappuccino, the sleeves of your flannel rolled up to your elbows, mellow synth…

Parallel Structures

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He gave her his driving range and she gave it back. She didn’t know what a bogey was. Arms akimbo he smiled and licked the China cat by the window.

20. Smitten

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Your tunamelt cadence / Sank me to ocean floors

The New Girl

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She’s new, with the enthusiasm of a new person. And everyone wants the new girl.

the hunt

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Not as a Poet

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She's not a poet, but does she have to be? She comes to the reading to read the poems of her recently dead husband, for she made a vow: that she would read his work at an open mic. Now she is keeping her word. It's her way of keeping him alive or maybe it's his way of…

The Glassblower

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His beloved are paper-thin when he blows into the free end. Green tint from copper.