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Almost There

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On the phone I asked my mother how she was doing. “I’m getting old,” she said. “Going slow. But getting there. I’m ninety-four!” My mother was always 94, when she was really 93. I remember she was 93, right after she turned 92. And 92 when she was

In Which Lovers Separate, As Always

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We used to find ourselves watching a World War II documentary, but from the periphery of our vision; because our tongues would be swishing against each other, and we’d be breathing each other’s wind; and we wouldn’t be as in to it as we used to but we wou

Knowing the Ending

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“No!” Shouted Jon. “I don't get it!” Clarissa stared at her hands in her lap and tried not to cry. She knew it was her fault they were there. She was the one who cheated. But she could not understand why Jon wanted, no needed, to…

Affairs of the Heart

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The next morning, I was shaved, skinned and stuffed like a Thanksgiving turkey for its untimely demise.

At Schwartz's

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Sometimes he made a corny joke and smiled. The gold in his tooth glowed like sunshine. He was the most important man in my life.

a little passion among them

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A reddening? A certain swelling, a little passion among them, is there? What lips would not have given what they could, to speak more boldly, more fondly of you now? But now the country is fastened to arrogance, welded to it in an evil way, wanton with violent…

9/11 -- The Angel Closes the Rain

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We were clinging to hope and innocence Until the second jet struck the Twin Towers That was when real evil twisted our hearts And we were left without prayer, or power Yes, a couple holding hands jumped from the building But when I was the o

Synthetic Terror

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When I wake up, I am almost drowning in a sea of styrofoam.

learning to unread

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what happens to literature's characters when their readers traverse the veil?

Walking Green

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1. There is a crowd of people walking to a field and since there are over forty of them, the conversations become divided and then subdivided in accordance w/natural rhythms. I follow behind. It is a football game. Makeshift. Twenty aside roughly. Almost every…

Another dead chicken

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in the chicken house this morning. The second one this week. I carry the stiff hen out to the back pasture

Wanna Ball?

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She came out to Laguna Beach one time, and we saw each other at this party and she asked if I wanted to “ball,” as she put it. Yes, I said immediately, because I was famished and really wanted a lot of sex because I had just finished a three month project

Tinnitus Story

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I went to see an audiologist this afternoon. He specialized in tinnitus. Good news for me. I've been plagued with tinnitus for 55 years. It started the morning after a catastrophic experience with LSD. It was there when I awoke in a padded room in a hospital in San José,…

Mondo Ben

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Two girls in vests hogtied his ankles and wrists with a severed lamp cord and barbed wire, spun him dizzy around the room.

Drunken Terrorists Act

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They asked each other at Court-suggested AA meetings: What can Texas do but throw us in jails already packed with low-life scum?

Heart Shaped Charms

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He steered to the roadside and answered her question before she could ask.

News Sequence

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On-air personalities inflate a balloon Trump head to the point of bursting.

vast dance of the darling soul

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Was it only for the vast dance of the darling soul, that you were born? Not to give up your genetics? Made for the use of the future, were you? I should have known. I heard the wind that swirled within you, even then, when we were so young. You were

Red

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There's a boarded up Chevron a few blocks down the street from where I used to live. I still pass it every now and again as I'm going to and from jobs. When I lived in the area, which was about three years ago, there was this one red-headed female gas jockey that seemed to…

whose soul do you have?

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Whose soul do you have, now? (How many are you?) There are several around here running from death, laughing, whom you might know. I burned ahead, with life. I found my own haughtiness had little bearing on the unbraided thread of pleasure (when I wa

Practicing Angel - song

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I thought I saw you once When you were still quite young Surveying great beauty Like a rain shower in the sun And I can still hear them nearby Those sharp voices of our youth Shouting with pleasure in the fields While looking at the sky

Confessions of a Latter-Day Computerholic

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Boy, it is weird out there, talking to real people!

Women With Colds and the Men Who Love Them

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“This is when things pick up with the ‘stuffies,’” says Sergeant Jim Hampy of the Vice Squad. “They lie low during the summer, then come back when cold and flu season starts.”

Out Walked Bud: The Manic Life and Obscure Death of Bud Powell

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From the opening bars that conjure up the sounds of European auto horns, "Parisian Thoroughfare" is as light as French pastry, as free and airy as a skirt blown by the wind.

Suicide Watch

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It's good to be home. It's good to be home. It's very good to be home

Event Particle (6)

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...something is pulsing in the shovel against the window and its pompadour of snow.

In black velvet

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I can't show you the territory- not quite yet, not how I see it. But I do have a map, a glorious and vain construction. It gives you a glimpse, a sight. I wish you could see it all.

Salesman

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A salesman, a born salesman like my brother, is always and only involved in the Moment, and it is the sale itself that is at the heart of the moment, and my brother Harris was really at the top of his form as a salesman. It can probably best be said, th

Islands

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Off of the northeastern coastline there was a series of islands that won bread and butter through fishing. We walked off the ferry and through various docks while noticing vessels come in slowly boasting sides protected by worn plastic fenders on ropes affixed to…

Lend a Hand

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Now how do you feel about that, My future graverobber friend?