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The Hostage

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My mother should have been a minister or a peace officer. Instead, she was a homemaker who ran the home like an agency. There were certain hard and fast rules.

bucket of keys

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I imaged him at his mother's house, eating chicken and tabouli with her at her round marble table, leaning back and laughing, then reading my “love you” and excusing himself to cry in the bathroom.

We're The Atwoods

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I remember a time when Calvin, my husband, was like Winnie the Pooh and I was a jar of fine Provençal honey. No amount of my sweetness could satisfy his craving for me. He would spread me on his toast with butter at breakfast and mix me with peanut butter

Fourth Time’s a Charm

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We wait for a server to bring our coconut cream pie. His favorite. I hate coconut.

The Exiled Realm

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destinies bring me to a damned desert

Dreams Bright White Smash

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She was there then gone then there again. We were naked and wet and touching, she let me touch her, but she didn't want to be there. But she was, despite herself. It was my dream. You can go if you want. …

Timmy's Singularity

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Suddenly, the room was filled with a screaming vortex directed at a pinpoint in the corner. Timmy's bureau was gone and everything loose in the room was flying towards the spot it had occupied. Timmy stood up in horror. He tried to seal this rent by tossi

It's May. Enjoy Yourself!

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May is National Masturbation Month. How do I know? My pal Senior Sex Expert Joan Price is not only vigorously celebrating, but doing everything she can to spread the word.“I'm on it!” I assured her when she told me. “Thanks.”…

Everything Foreign

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In college, I made friends with my Jewish roommate. Her name was Leah and she was from Brooklyn. When she asked me home with her for Thanksgiving, she mentioned we could go to synagogue together. I asked if there would be other black people there. "No," Leah…

our ragged wits, ragged minds

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Our ragged wits, ragged minds, after acting out all, imitating all honey-like tunes, air song, excellence of song, true flower of the world. So the sun has some of its honey wintered away, to bring it into contact with such a human voice as yours.

Gentility

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The walls of our shanty were of the standard corrugated rusty metal typical of communities like ours.We did our cooking over a Bunsen burner purloined from the Catholic Boys' School - beans mostly. We did our drinking from bottles of Thunderbird or Old Crow (when…

Brief excerpt from the Fantasy thing I'm writing.

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Lucien Lucien Tidesquall lay almost sleeping amid the soft green grass. His eyes irradiated green midnight under vanquished brows. A plover hovered somewhere in the distance. It reminded him of a poem he had written as a teenager, a haiku that went as…

Sunrise

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The musician’s wife had a roving eye. He didn't care. He liked being married to a wild and crazy woman.

Lassitude

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It's morning, and the cold black hull of branches sets my resting pier, Amid this drizzle, underneath the poignant pain of birches, wrecked By floods of midyear grieving; wraithlike, Dawn's been becked To paint in shafts of faded rose that shades the fen…

Dark Cave, No Candle

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Writing books is like raising children. You do your best, nurture them, discipline them, coddle them, feed them, patch up their injuries, sing to them, try to sell them, but no matter what you do, they are what they are.

Prairie Flowers

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As a kid he had run away from the family farm and shoveled coal back East to put himself through college. Now he was just another old man in a nursing home, desperate for a drink, his blue eyes bleary, a sticky goo filming at the corners of his lips.

The Rider

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"The rider rode his bike in Arizona just about every day and for all the usual reasons....."

Deifying Gravity

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This gravity thing, I reckon, is enamored with me. It loves me so much that it has fettered me with itself.

Midwestern Charm

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He slathered the glue on my scalp and talked non-stop about Harlem. Electrodes or nodes, I never asked which, would measure something inside my head. I doubt they actually did though, measure anything. I've had the pleasure of having wires glued to my skull before and have…

ExsanguiNations

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leaches fatten-up

Blow Me

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[BEEZLEBUB SAYS, "GO!"]

Tariff Happy

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Expose those for whom freedom is greed.

Groceries

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Your son is six feet tall in the sixth grade. By his sophomore year of high school, he outweighs you by a hundred pounds. He's been offered four football scholarships and one for a sport he's never played. Every morning his mother, your ex ex-wife, makes his breakfast of a…

Times Remembered

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Delightful days spent at the beach. Children building castles; as parents watched waves glistening under the afternoon sunlight. Sanderlings running with beaks down, hoping for a tasty morsel through the ebb and flow of tides. As time went by, briefcases,…

The House on El Nino Diablo Court, Part 2

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Inspired by "The Dunwich Horror"" by H.P. Lovecraft, this excerpt concerns the events in the life of a man who is coming to the awareness that his son has followed in his grandfather's steps and begun the process of conjuring a spirit that killed him.

Hey, Boys, Bandits!

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I remember one time that summer I was with you (1964) going to a bar in maybe it was Melrose Park, or Northlake, or somewhere along Roosevelt Road closer to Chicago, not as far as Cicero though. I went there with a crazy gear-head named Roger Hudson, wh

A Day in the Life of Mike

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This is a very impromptu piece written at two in the morning based on a prompt from Meg Pokrass, who insisted the following words be used: fussyhairybloomingslipperyflutterdamppaleweedsyanking “Maxfuss” was his password, which was appropriate,…

You Have No Idea

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“I want you to face the toys!”

Brexit

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Reams of saggy bunting intersect the streets.

Hook

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“What the fuck!” Duke muttered, amazed at what he was seeing in the darkened store. A thin curtain of smoke was rising from under the baseboard like an inverted waterfall. It stretched the entire length of the left wall. Holy shit, the joint's on fire! I…