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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…

Pot or Marijuana

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Every six weeks or so, he and I would argue. I would argue. He would listen. He raised me twenty-five cents each time. I suppose that is a bad habit for me to have gotten into—to get pissed about rates and to fight to get a raise.

After Appomattox

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The renegade states- Virginia, Georgia,/ Texas, and the rest- should have lost their names

Our Enormous Fat Man

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Pity would have been appropriate. Yet, townsfolk whispered behind his back. Shouldn't he do something about it. So lazy. A gluttonous swine. Hadn't his mother kept him too long at tit, breastfeeding ‘til four? Look. Look at him now. A fat man. Our enormou

Colours

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Not yet confident enough, for example, to feel free to interrupt, to suggest, to demur; not free of his desires his urgency (‘in the morning, fiddle diddle dee, when I rise’)

Get Thee to a Nunnery

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I was in a nunnery wondering how I wound up in the midst of so many nuns as it wasn't my nature to hang out with nuns. I find them tedious and redundant, though I do have to say I appreciate their economy with words. You never really saw a…

If the Shoe Fits

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I didn’t say to eat your keys and parrots. It was peas and carrots. Idiot!

Chicken Human

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I was in a Chinese restaurant trying to read the menu when I realized Hunan was only 1 letter off of Human I thought it read Chicken Human This was just in a dream, so I ordered it It was delicious, but kind of salty Then someone at ano

Change of Heart

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They pumped him full of electricity and waited.

Please Do Not Blame Me

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I was disappointed with love, and like everyone else, stammered out of love into a place horrified with meaning.

Thanksgiving

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Unless we see it, probe it, Name it, star by star, and feel This awful, tenuous gratitude.

just plain Jerry

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I remember one afternoon when Terry and I did it in broad daylight in a nearby park in Lombard, or Glen Ellen. This was after we had broken up already and I was seeing Jolene, I think, before leaving to go out to my writing program at U.C. Irvine. It wa

The Bedlam of Essence

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When the house was sold the new owners walked in on what they believed was a former life stopped cold. There on the table remained a half-filled teacup and a well-read magazine lying open from years gone by. A Royal Doulton dish set lay half packed on the

for want of water

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you shimmered me with attention

gravelortian part 14

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He was an old cat

Arcana Magi Pure Vol.6 - c.4

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Rumiko stood quiet, staring out at Mayumi slowly approaching the shrine. Keiko cast a spell at the structure before them while Emi stood before her sister calling out to her and Mrs. Saito struggled to pull Mayumi away.

the plural river

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Like large drops of rain on the active lap of earth, I heard myself falling all around the vacant spaces where you had once been. Emptying myself with dissolution, trying to alter the essence, to begin again where we had left off, as if to wind string b

Motorized Elderly Armageddon

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Oldies are not goodies.

But She Means Well

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My wife said she’d only be gone 10 minutes. 10 minutes. She left me with the 2 boxes we couldn’t fit into the car, and went home to unload the 5 others. She’d be back in 10 minutes. I got a call after half an hour, she was on her way back to get me. I

Black Wheat, 6

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The soul was in the eyes but (it) isn't The animal is in the body and can't be hidden One senses the density of the blood there Occasionally the soul rises to the surface Occasionally the animal comes into the eyes They use people and throw them away

Between the Trees

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In his head the moment would have been different.

Elk Hunters

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"Damn! All I've got is a hundred dollar bill."

What I know about love

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There are many forms of impossible love. For example when the rain soaked streets are littered with yellow leaves.When a fine mist hangs in the air, and it is twilight and you are not here

The House on El Nino Diablo Court

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On a cold, dark night near to All Hallows' Eve in October of 1930, I was summoned by Constable John Wakefield to the house of Vernalier Driscoll. The constable was wild-eyed and very nervous, his hair appeared to be standing on end.

The Process of Understanding (Strawberry Bees)

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Are all my words lonely, or nearly departed; decapitated; Visible only from the ankles down, nonchalant? I Get bored. All my words are not paying Strict attention to the television. I get dysfunctional. My words, coincidental though they…

It's All in Your Head

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The terms of a broken heart, I guess I nevergot to read them. But they must besomething awful, something numbing, something no sane personwould ever agree to. You're already on the vergeof becoming nothing I can remember without a photograph beingshoved in my face. Like a…

Afton Mountain

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fog settles over the mountain laying a ghostly blue shroud

4 Poems in an Avante-Garde Classical Style

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For Derek, Remembering Odd Jaunts in Overtoun I here remembered how we smoked and swam Under the cadenced pleasure of our under-days, Congealing cross-thoughts under oaken breeze, And watched the Turnered ocean of that swarm Last…

Shade to Shade

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Cathy told the boy to sit in the seat behind her, and gave him her scarf for his face. He nodded and plucked the scarf gingerly from her hands, suspending it between the clean thumb and ring finger on his left hand.