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Excerpt from the Novella "Iron Butterfly"

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Did I knowingly choose to enter Gloria’s garden and the warm, dark, hollow spaces she offers? Or is it something else that draws me?

Clockwhipped

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I now felt prepared to waltz under a K bullet that hits a stucco brick above the tropical hibiscus.

Stop It!

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Don’t shout. Be nice Cheer up. Sit up Straight. Don’t play With your food. Elbows Off the table. Watch Your language. Use Your napkin. Eat the Crust Stop fidgeting Stop scratching Close your mouth When you chew Remember to Clea

Where the Subways Go Above Ground in Brooklyn

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The rocks are hot along the East RiverBelow hazy skies sent from Jersey Traffic.Pigeons peck at pieces of detritus,Walking calmly by pedestrians passingThrough the park during their allotted lunchHour. A girl with a strange frame —As if her ribs fused with her hips…

Just Before the Funeral

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We had been on the way to the church when we found them. The handkerchief in my breast pocket was folded just so and I'd tried to recreate the perfect ribbon in Ashley's hair, …

Puke

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What the fuck is that smell? Puke? Pine-Sol? Oh shit!Back seat of a cop car.Again?What is it this time?“Excuse me, officer? Where the fuck are my clothes?”

When Do We Breathe?

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You deserve air.

WE SHOULDN'T HAVE BOUGHT THE FIREWORKS

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My chin is half-eaten. My chest is gone. There is a rhythm to how each flame licks me. Like how you used to in the mornings before work. Before the coffee. Before the toaster. Before a rose clenched between your teeth and dancing.

A Dance at Midnight

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The city was spread before me in a pattern of dancing lights, alternately hidden and revealed by the blowing snow. At this distance, it was almost beautiful. Of course, the beauty was an illusion, obvious only at a distance. If I stood here until dawn, I’

Skins of my past

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The past follows, battered, bruised, always behind

Maybe Just One More Then

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You don't deserve this poem and I don't deserve to write it. Whatever time we have left is way better spent sitting in a sunny garden with a good interesting book and with a beautiful golden delicious apple to bite into. But…

Lift

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He repeated Honey, I miss you. He could be cruel. He let their son chase his kite for hours in the park while he sat between two tourists on their way out of the city just last week. He could hear her now, running a bath for herself, forgetting John's Apple Jacks before…

Jim

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Jim twisted the skinny trunk of his body in a fast, violent jerk just as the cop grabbed the buckle of his left Harley Davidson boot. When the boot flopped off, Jim found himself sitting upright, ready to jump up and run. But then he felt the baton lock down on his…

Labor Day

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The coals lose their glow.Sun kisses the back of my neck goodbye.Someone plays Boys of Summer one more time.The cooler tips... The tides go out...

#1

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“I am the Successor of Peter!” he said, supporting himself on the shepherd’s staff topped with a crucifix: “And you are trespassing on Holy Ground.” Baal said: “No ground is Holy for me.

Arcana Magi Zero Arc 2 - c.3

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All Karin did was watch from the street. No movement. No reaction. She just watched.

Brand

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Nobody buying...

London Calling

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Bloomsbury crowd

An Exquisite Fall From Grace

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He lay on a wooden pallet, which he had placed inside a cardboard box that might have once held a refrigerator. Except the box was labeled “Robotic Endoscopic Surgery System.” His head was propped on a gym bag that contained all his possessions. Outside, it…

birdbrain

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feathered flightless freak of nature

The End of the Gig

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His throat had turned red after a few days of singing, and when he looked in the mirror he saw little sacs of white pus, like pimples, in the back of his mouth. “You got to pace yourself,” the big black woman who sang at the other beer garden told him.

Writer's Block? Get Nacreous!

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If you have writer’s block, it may be because your childhood wasn’t unhappy enough, but there’s nothing you can do about that now, is there?

A New Woman

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George didn’t move when Cindy punched him in the nose. He just stood up and walked to the fridge, poured a glass of water and dropped a few ice cubes into the glass. The ice cracked in the glass as he walked back to the couch.

The After

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I watched her look at mewithout any eyes.She turned her head as wesat on the edge of the bed.Instead of eyesthere were hollow indentations of soft tissue,bulbs, and closed,tissue sown, pinched togetherwith pulls and zigzagslike crosshatching, where…

Not Particles but Waves

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not in the interest of verisimilitude/ for there's plenty of that in each day already/ as trajectories interrupt other trajectories

Nascent Talk with the Gypsy

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She was having a laugh, but I didn't know what about. We were sitting in a big house that was on the top of a large incline. All these books were scattered around, and the walls and the kitchen, the doors and the quarter round and every other thing, was old and…

yesterday/today

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bones and shuttered windows

Gauntlet

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They bury their own.

L.A. Blonde

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Then there was Marsha, the blonde bombshell, at Irvine, who slept over one night only. As in the original one night stand, your standard L.A. blonde beach-girl bombshell ex-cheerleader tear your heart out and spit it as far as she could. Wrench your bal

Work of a Reader

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Then it gets worse—this reading of books—I go to the café and can only read a minimalist there, one crouton at a time.