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Instructions for Assembly

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Please be advised to have at least 2 persons to assemble this unit Although it could take close to a dozen Always include at least 2 kibitzers Another 2 or 3 standing around sipping vodka martinis Be sure to have enough olives to go around And b

Tingles

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Your steering wheel is hot.You don't feel it though, I mean,It tingles some but it doesn't have that crawling, stinging feelingLike the way you'd feel it if they hadn't called.Not the way other people in Arizona feel it.You don't feel you or her or anything in…

Let the Fat Man Sing

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For every Ruben Studdard, there are ten Mick Jaggers and, considered merely in terms of avoirdupois, the two sides of that scale would probably balance.

The First Time. Maybe Our Second or Third

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She sat me down naked on a kitchen chair and fucked me in the dining room, hovering over me, then sitting down on top of me I was upstanding It was outstanding, raw, and exciting No children or adults around, or dogs, cats or birds, no goldf

My Composite Girlfriend

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Her dad regaled me with stories of his up-from-the-bootstraps climb out of poverty on the hard-scrabble, rough-and-tumble Lower East Side of New York, where he founded the leading supplier of hyphens to writers of purple prose.

Two More for Akutagawa

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Heading for the fields one morning to paint haystacks, Vincent noticed his neighbor’s house ablaze.

New Year's Resolution

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“Hey, come on and sit down,” Jake motioned to her. It was three in the morning and after way too many gins the last thing Melisa wanted to do on New Year’s Eve was to chat with her ex-boyfriend. In fact if she had known he was goin

sing your swan song

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They had to dress normal, my other boyfriends, be beardless, hairless, everything torn away, plucked, shorn smooth, because it elicited moisture on the tongue (when I was with you.) But I grew bored as the day before I first saw you.

Your party invitation just arrived (guest poem by Carolyn Martin)

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"I’d rather move a word around a page than raise a glass or pass a plate or work a room immune to poetry."

Stuff & Nonsense

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artifacts gone obsolete / miscegenating in suspension

Parables for Rodin

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His beard is an eighteenth-century forest / in south central France

Gun Love

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That was the year I got my Daisy bee-bee gun for Christmas....

The End of History

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Well, I walked in on you, then you walked out on me And that was when it happened – the end of history And that should have been sufficient But I think you know it wasn’t I remember it was you who told me Dreams are only efficient when illusio

Tipping The Balance Sheet(The Feet Within the Beat is an Old Battered Hat By Now and Don't You Just Know It!)

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be kind to your pieces…/torn

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Pieces that said shrug a shrug and then another and one to right with the eyes that squint and one to left with rhythm that never left. And piece after piece, after piece they stich themselves, née weave a tapestry that is the dance your very walk swayed

There Were Giants Upon the Earth in Those Times and the Wickedness of Men

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A pair of snakes contemplates gulping a pair of frogs.

God and Man at Yale

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“Well, of course I served in the CIA . . . everybody did, back then!” he says with a grin. “Two goddamn bloody well years . . . I was a regular Nayland Smith, I tell you. …

Testament Part 4 of 6

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We once saw giants in the clouds and in/ connected points of stars, and named/ them, gods. We placed them in their high-halled villas,/ on the mountaintop, to game and frolic

The Silent Service

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Anxiety masked.

Take You Me for a Sponge, My Lord?

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Who does that besides Kafka, Arreola, and Steven Wright?

Where Has All the Laughter Gone?

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The despair that comes and goes is here again I saw a woman who was holding herself As she walked past, as if a fire were about to Lunge out of her parts She was in such great need of being held The despair that comes and goes is here again

A speck on the wall

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I’m leaning into my freedom and will have you take your portable prison with you and you can set those four walls across town.

- excerpt from - Whitehouse 180

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Bloggers venomously characterized Mitt as a "bumper sticker Patriot", the kind of coward who wraps himself up in a flag, puts a bumper sticker on his car, sings the national anthem at the top of his lungs and is the first person to yell out "Freedome Isnt

Tough Guy

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He remembers his father’s concrete slab hands. Balled into fists they resembled kettlebells.

WHEN YOUR HULL HAS BEEN BREACHED AND THE HEART OF THE OCEAN IS NOT IN YOUR POCKET

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Her heart is the color of fuck. Not the color she'd imagined; the soft pink of parting lips, the fading hand print on steamed—up windows, like Leo and Kate in that fancy car the night it sank. His car was a dented jeep…

Israel's Pig

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“Isril, I won't lose dis child tuh hunger,” Mina said as she rocked her young son to sleep. Noah sat on her lap, head on her chest, and exhaled a plaintive moan that grew softer and softer with…

Can I Get a New To-Do List

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I got a male bouffant hairdo like Trump I can’t wait to develop patience And the next time I have a ringing in my head I’m not going to answer it Can I Get a New To-Do List? I tried changing my name to Richard Vixen Until the State Dept. too

Burn

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No one believed me when I told them this: I took all of my novels and tossed them into the fire.

Moreneta

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Hold my heart the child in your arms The roses of April blooming, I bend down before you cracked and broke Spilled out like albumin.

When I was little

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I was little, very little, when Happiness went away. I moved the entire earth, walked in the ferns, poked in the river. Happiness had disappeared. I looked to the sky. I remember, the sun had the porous face of an orange. Not unlike my skin. My eyes fixed above, I saw it…