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gravelortian part 18

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A poor boy scribbling

It is I, Hamlet, King of the Crabs

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Ronnie comes home carrying two sacks of groceries, one including a four-pack of Virgil's root beer. This is heavy stuff. It amazes me she is able to carry these items up our steep hill, nearly a mile in distance. I watch the news on our French cable station while she…

Virginia Aste

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This is like getting a hand full of black slugs as a gift.

Peyote Buttons

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In the sides of mountains the rivers rush through and who would stop them as they gain a hold on the world? For silences they keep just then, as if from a larger wisdom and different clock. Pink moons and funny coins with the heads of lions and lambs, and the quarter…

The Knife Edge

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Max understood this perfectly and could easily picture the slow-motion buckling of the spars and the accordion collapse of the fuselage as the propeller blades’ churned up the ground.

77 Words About Nothing (4.05.2012)

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I sold my ego to pay a parking ticket. And then I wrote 77 words about mental health.

femme fatale

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her knife cleaves a single red hair

Writing Prompts

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If you want to be a writer, just write stuff.

Mesmerized

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Those eyes – they held a lost blue sadness that enveloped her and stopped her mid-movement.

An Attempt at Reconciling with the Non-Existent

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dealing with an over-aged imaginary friend gone rogue

Boolean Muteness

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I believe in scouring the sea with spears

You Knew It

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was only a small enough matter of time before you started to show up as new words like soft pink clues dropped inside tiny fingernail teacups to find their innermost meaning, then wishes, floating up near the top like…

The Bookshelves

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rows and sections of casually arranged selectionswell crafted but haphazardpretty objets d'art randomly placed as cluesto significant life moments and revealing preferencesmy mother was an interior designershe would have clucked her tongueher head cocked to the sideas she…

Admonition

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Let routine/ propel you through/ the day after/ the day before.

Goliath

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He glances at the other patrons of the café. He has the mix of middle management goliath and shy, fat kid at a school swimming pool. Neither fit comfortably but it's as bespoke as his suit, protective as fat. The arm rests on the table curling protectivel

Going Along for the Ride

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You could hear her coming from a long way off like she kept trying to catch her breath, like she was getting the fun rattled out of her bones. But it was laughter, always laughter that kept on filling up her belly from the inside and she was

This Story Will Break Your Heart

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The first years of her life she had been owned by a bear hunter and trained to hunt bear, a terrible turn of luck for her.

The Meaning of Salvation

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I descend to my grave / where I will unbend / until the Coming of Christ

Philip Guston and the Ultimate Mudball

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The huge mudball has rolled downhill, catching up one of them. Part of a leg sticking up from the surface with its shoe still on, but we can assume the rest of the human, or humanity if you will, is lost somewhere deep inside it.

Industrial Revelation

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I tell my students about a timewhen seniority was told by the number of fingers on a worker's hands No weekends or overtime, children — bare toes dangling — twelve hours on the line I look for…

No Such Thing

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People could disappear in the Pine Barrens and never be seen again. Either by their own choice or when someone didn’t want the body found. John Dance knew that was just a part of life you had to accept and couldn’t change.

Bougainvilla Drive

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blue plexiglass skateboard is holding the light of a turmeric sun. jacob turns it this way and that and lets it sit on its side atop parking curbs. denim legs canvas feet. looking down sign ridden streets and squinting. sometimes sun showers leak out. cotton…

Jill Walks Across the Snow Covered Gas Station Parking Lot, Sits Next to Jack on the Curb and Gives Him a Cigarette

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Maybe adulthood isn't the destination I always thought it was?

The Fool on the Hill

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It is wonderful to talk to Mick Jagger in his hotel room. He is absolutely charming, and the women filling the room seem as natural as the sound of rain or the play of sunlight.

Shell

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a wingover a dark sealooking up from what you're doingwhat you're not doinglooking upseeing what I don't seeor the same thingalteredwhen I was eightI cut my foot on a sea shellblood is red sea waterput a shell to your earyou'll hear your own bloodhowling in the night…

The Doorstop of Time

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And then there was a man pissing in 2 urinals, going back and forth between them, saying, “You know how they say 2 heads are better than one? Well, now I get it!”

Stableford

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Mike Summer's moustache was perfect. Hard bristle and so symmetrical it looked cut to the angles of a military imperative. He was pretty proud of it, thought the team of beaters, who watched him as he sat on the boot ledge of his sage green Mercedes 123 T, combing…

The Busy World is Perfectly Happy

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to continue to crumble its way through another grinding cycle of slowly walking to the edge of the universe ancient treelike beings, like gentle ghost buffalo, and our own thundering buildings by the hundreds of thousands, …

Bendable

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“You're bendable,” he said, and then there was this silence as we looked into the space in front of us. I understood what he meant right off and thought it a gift to speak to someone that did not get the words exactly right, but in not doing so, got…

Tabula Rasa

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accidental ground/ for index-fingered figures