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How To Give Dating Advice as a State Social Worker

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I tell him if he wants to impress a girl he should learn to cook. He shifts his body. I add, crab cakes work well.

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

Cheese

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When exactly does cheese go bad? it simply does not, I say.

The Hitler Channel

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The sound of a siren approaches his home. His wife asks him why he's so nervous. It's nothing, he says, but he rises from the couch and peers into the night from behind the curtains. The siren approaches relentlessly. The road twists and turns and the sound fades but always…

Grand Finale

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Adam hitched his dinosaur to a covered wagon. He drove the Virgin Mary to the Faire. Shiva rode behind them in a silver limousine combing out his long and flowing hair.

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.

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.

In Battle of Mascots, San Dorito State Usually Wins

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“A lot of kids–granted, kids who aren’t too bright–will choose a school because of its mascot, and that’s what Chipper is all about,” he says.

Civilization Marches On

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The redwood trees were taller than dreams

Gomalco, Inc.

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“You've got to be kidding me. A robot?”, said Marge as she rotated in the chair at her desk. She removed the leaf of paper from the typewriter and set in down on the desk. She looked up at Parkins who was leaning against the wall nursing a cold cup of…

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…

When the Moon Becomes the Sun

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While most spread their time in other occupation, I traveled through books and grew my imagination. I knew endless bliss. I was a book eater. I would just devour books that I loved and slug through those I didn't, just to make myself eat the truths and li

Happy Christmas to my quantum mechanic-

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this elegant silver wrench/ which from the opposite side/ becomes a golden Phillips-head

Nocturnes

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You go out on a night with no moon, when all the stars are flush in the sky, when all of everything, even you, is just a shadow moving softly, and I swear, you can hear it, if you listen hard enough. The music. It’s like it’s coming from under the ground.

Yogurt

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Later, you've hit that four shot espresso limit; you've snarfed down that too rich mushroom korma… gone before you tasted it.

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.

Bear Weather

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

Desire

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

Self-possession

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Self-possession. He had it. In his arctic white t-shirt; blonde haired, broad shouldered, unburdened. “I will make you love me,” he had said, in a bar.

Poem before Video Store

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Last night was full of little fists

But then you walked out on me

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I watched as you tried to fit yourself quite awkwardly into the small chair. Your eyes fluttered curiously around my house, and I smiled to myself. Your vision landed on my smile, and your face wore an expression of puzzlement."What are you smiling at?" you asked, your…

Three Questions on Distance Running

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Do you see the hot coals of doing? The way time sizzles or wilts…eat those coals.

That Day

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Freedom brings its own fears.

Five Million Yen: Chapter 32

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Wait a minute, said Ben. What do we really know?

Marion

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Gibson Park, underneath the grove of trees beside the soccer field. She's buried. But don't say anything yet. Her disappearance will make the news shortly, but it hasn't yet.

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.

Zum is one instance of "um" herein

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Millennium jumped strumming lithium gum cumulative outnumber humiliated résumé jumpy instruments

Bardo

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In the quiet dark, fathers reappear.

When Deer Attack

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Carla woke up from her hospital bed screaming. "Somebody please help me. Please save me. I am begging you."

Get a Hold of God, Will You?

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Get a Hold of God Get a hold of God, will you? I have seen a lot I saw a Great Dane licking the dew off an orange bird of paradise Get a hold of God and tell him that Get a hold of God and give him a piece of my m