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Tariff Happy

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Expose those for whom freedom is greed.

The Cusp of Leaving

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She waited on the hot, broken pavement, arm outstretched, her thumb a ticket to a distant, refracted horizon. Waves of heat danced like undulating snakes under the spell of a charmer. She pictured herself passing through them, abandoning the green of home for the…

we used to drop her off along the way

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We do it all the time...

Art Is Resilient

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Our revolutionaries Have evolved into gamekeepers

Darkness On My Mind

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Darkness on my mind doesn't make me blind.

The New Lycanthropy

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Who remains after the aching night has departed into dawn and left us to week-old sleep

The Vitality of Stones

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we can’t hear the hum/ and the heat is imperceptible.

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

The Nude Pianist: A Novel: Chapter 19

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—Michiko, are you allergic to cats?

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.

The Fourth Prague Defenestration: 5

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Vladimir walked down the little path next to the creek with us. I stopped along the way and picked off a sliver of some of the bedrock that was sticking out alongside the narrow path, to take home with me as a souvenir of my family castle, just to be ab

Interstellar Solace

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he considers the swirl of galaxies/ with their black hole hearts,

September 26, 2016

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whatever weaknesses you displayed// as empathetic human fellow traveler,/ your command of English survives you,// on into the last echoes of the human/ once we’re gone.

The Amazing Adventures of Macro-Microbe

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Macro-Microbe parked his car and proceeded on foot, which was a misnomer because he had no feet. Typical for Manhattan, no one gave him a second glance except for a homeless woman who tried to sell him hand-sanitizer. Macro-Microbe locomoted himself insid

Here is the thing. No one knows what it (actually) represents

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beyond knowing that when it hits you, you've been very much run over, and flattened like a stack of cardboard pancakes. I've seen it all before, and it works all right I guess. But my oh my, my, my oh thank you Jesus, to…

An Alphabet

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A daydreams about a woman whose name he’s forgotten next to B, who’s been drunk since afternoon.

Fragment from an Unwritten Diary

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It's not stories the quiet lack, but inclination...

Arcade

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My father owned a penny arcade. I worked for him every summer all during my youth. My job was to hand green tickets to customers who achieved a certain score on Skee-Ball or shuffleboard. The coupons could be redeemed for merchandise which we had on display on…

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,

it was after a revolution, or a war, or some disaster

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I had this dream. We were living together, and we were in bed asleep when strange, enormous cats began crowding around our windows and meowing. They made awful scratching and scraping noises at the windows, trying to come in. But I couldn’t wake you up.

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.

My Commencement Speech

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To The Graduates Of The Class Of 2010: You are here today at a critical crossroads of your life. For most of your 22 years you’ve been taught to work hard, obey the rules, listen with respect to your elders and to trust that every effort you make wil

The Human Phenom Project

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I sat at the vast graveyard of broken hearts on the mending fence of wonderment unsealing the silence of the wounds I began to put the pieces together like a puzzle against forgetting

Assiduity Eighteen

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A convoy of military vehicles is heading into the city as we are heading out.

Sisyphus

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I build pedestals.It's hard workHeld together by sweat, love, and lofty thoughts - an unsound foundation.The tiniest bit of heartbreak,and it comes crashing down. Always, I blame the builder and not the vandal. The next one will be…

A Shower of Rain

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You have at least an intermittent belief.

My Brother's House

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The last time my old lady threw me out, I decided to go and stay with my brother. I thought, "That's the last place I'll be welcome," and I knew that was true. The drive was calming, which was good, because Steven wouldn't have even let me in if I…

Desire

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The young monk rose early to jog, his appetites trailing like cats in heat.

Carmen Scarpino, Pioneering Wise Guy, Dead at 78

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Breasts were developed after World War II, the result of improved nutrition and the additional muscle mass that “Rosie the Riveter”-types acquired through manual labor in jobs that males abandoned to join the war effort.

The New Main Stream

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An hour later, we're no closer to the tunnel. In our rental car, we're just two in a school of a thousand fish skimming the edge of the island. Go with the flow, we keep saying to each other. We're just going with the flow. …