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Bear Weather

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Man, this bearskin rug was a big, awkward sonofabitch on his back....

Pieces of the poet

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This is the poem you leave behind that you die in the middle of.

Wild Dreams of Reality, 14

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We both looked toward the house. We could just make out a light that was barely visible coming from the side where their bedroom window was. Slowly an evil grin appeared on Darrell's face. He looked at the knife in his hand. "This will do it!" he sa

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.

The Turning

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A brief colorful season/ and then the fall as winds/ break the hold the leaves have

The Incident

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There are some I don’t recognize. My gaze lingers for a second. It’s bad business this.

The 0th Parallel

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These are the days you wish would never end.

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…

Yamoussoukro, 2012

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He is underneath them. His head is like the head of a worm.

The Fourth Prague Defenestration: 16

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I still wake up with a start to this day, remembering the sound of that squish. And the cheer from above of all the brutes hanging out the open castle window. And of course the roar of approval and delight from the hordes of Chinese, Russian, and Germ

It's My Birthday

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and the President didn't call.

Desire

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Dark morning sleet whitecrusts the world once more, shrouds remains of January thaw:

The Campus Socialists

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The Campus Socialists Paul and Mary Jo lived in an apartment at the top of a long, dark flight of stairs that were so high, I remember as if it were yesterday thinking, the night she pushed him down the stairs, he would surely be dead by the time h

How Zin Prepares for Early Winter While Saint Bernards Cause Major Traffic Jams along East Houston

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She sings off-key while her married lover shadow-boxes his one-dimensional and split-off selves.

Graven Images

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Mother hated a crucifix. Graven, she said. Evidence that Catholics weren't saved, just stuck in ceremony. Jesus had risen and anyone who had to pray in Latin, count beads or confess to robed men who took orders from a monarch didn't know…

Oops...

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--small chin, timid mouth, frail nose, weak narrow-set eyes--

My Plastic Dreams

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Once, in the past or future, but definitely not in the present, I worked as a transportation minister for a friendly dictator, whose name was neither Hitler, nor Stalin, nor Kim Jong-Un, but whose mustache was toothbrush, whose smile was sardonic to the p

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.

Now Lay in It

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The phone rang again at midnight. Maury sat straight up in bed, a reflex from his days in the barracks. Linda, his wife, was already sitting up. In the hint of moonlight, she dabbed her nose with a wadded tissue and made helpless little noises. Maury…

Frankenstein's Monster Eats the Brains of Virgins at the Witches' Chainsaw Orgy Massacre

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If Heaven holds forth its own Infinity, What of selves, of ours, could we stand to see? Cradled with harsh fangs of Memory, Deep forgetfulness, give rather me- Let bright dreams be our self's divinity: Forever holds, in morrow's hours, such little…

BACK IN THE USSUSSUSSR

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It was on the Fake News today, Oh boy They built a bridge from Alaska to Siberia Called the Bridge Over Troubled Waters Instead of a wall And Putin came riding bareback on a pink unicorn Into the White House and renamed it The White Horse,

Duration and Frequency

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for spirits and demons have no life/ but what imagination gives

the weather past where roads end

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a soft wooden clatter, wind-battered reeds/bound to the banks of ditches rank,/ill-purposed waters slide into low swamps/whose waters into rivers seep and crawl.

Carpe Mentis

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machine utility of thought, intangible aesthetic of sentiment.

A Conversation on an Empty Balcony

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I go with the wind, like the smoke of this Marlboro red as it dances among the palm trees.

A Dutiful Daughter

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The first indication I had of what I look like came when a man put me back on the rack, remarking that I was too pink. Over the weeks that followed, I gained a few more ideas about my appearance from the comments of people in the shop. My photographic side had been…

At Sevens

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Originally published on Six Sentences:He walked out of the hotel lobby into the pre-dawn night and thought about another woman, a pretty Spanish woman, not the woman he'd just kissed in a hotel, and a night he'd spent with her in Portugal, wanting each other desperately,…

Sunday in Dogpatch, circa 1990

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Inspired by the photographic work of Susan Lipper. Grapevine series, 1988-92. http://susanlipper.com/gv_23.html

Village of Humans

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It must have been then and in those days and during that time when the grass and short brush, like so much amber and jade, emerged from the snow and the poet Li Po, who while traveling within the ten thousand crags of the Tanggula Mountains, looked up…

Commander of the Armies of the Four Winds

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"Commander of the Armies of the Four Winds" concerns a nightmare endured by Commander Daniel Bennett of the San Diego Police Department after he is assigned to recover the stolen Necromancer Artifact, which purports to invoke nefarious spirits imprisoned