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Why I am Afraid of Spiders

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SPIDERS

The End of the World

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I find driftwood, long, smooth logs washed up on the beach, drag them to dunes still wet from the sea...

Rittenhouse Square: excert from Ari Figue's Cat

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Trunks of plane trees with parchment bark, their shaggy pillars bear a canopy of green like a great tent spread over the square of the park. Cool misting lawn sprinklers, their umbral spay--brick walks glisten in the mottled light. Fading blooms of rhodo

Confess another sin

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Arcana Magi - c.22: Moving Forward

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Alysia never said a word as she rested her body on Suzaku’s feathers. She felt the wings cover her like a blanket. It brought memories of her mother doing the same as they watched a movie together on the couch.

Corporal Punishment

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When I was a little boy, I had a thing about women’s behinds.

nudes

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for a handful of weeks/ my father took me to/ the college of art and design/ downtown/ where i took drawing lessons./

Frank Meets Francine

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I interviewed in an hour and didn’t have an umbrella, so I ducked inside the next door I passed. It didn’t matter what they sold, I wasn’t there to make a purchase.

The Sally-Anne Test

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Sally-Anne is in a graveyard. A girl about her age and height died two years before. Sally-Anne is digging up the bones. Her parents Aaron and Rebecca think she is at her piano…

Sees, Kindness, and Made

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SeesWe fell into this lake together and traced the clean soft lines straight back to ourselves, with a carefree laugh, ha ha ha-- an embarrassing ease. This small miracle does tend to put in orbit something high flying besides clouds into the sky inside of…

Beautiful Plague

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Jacob Obrecht, you are beautiful. Everything inside your head and everything you’ve ever made is beautiful and singing.

Lunch at Lefty's

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Sixteen years married, and now she wants a wedding ring. He brings her a box of Cracker Jack. She doesn’t think it is funny.

We Have Eskimo Bars

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Real men don’t screw around in Canada, he confided to the strawberry blonde sitting beside him at the Houston bar. He’d bought her a couple of beers, and her body language said she was interested.

Out of That Bed 1963

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My father's hands were huge. His left knuckles gashed as a kid when he rode his bike too close to a moving train. When his fingers fisted around a glass, the scarred joints bulged from his grip like blind eyes.

Kitty Love

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Our next door neighbor is in love with his cat. His wife sits in our kitchen crying her eyes out.

Josephine Skinny Jeans: Chapter 1

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Lee found a ship’s figurehead in a dumpster behind some shitty Indian restaurant last night.

The Meaning of Lines

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Hold your breathThe smoke here is thick, I knowIce underfoot, let it burn, let it go, but don't ask me to take your handYou have never been so patient as to sit and waiteven for the sun to riseWatch, now, here it comescresting over the hill as one large eyeboiling the…

Ditching the Universe for Katy

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I am running for only one thing now. For Katy.

Pieces

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I find my mother’s pink Pyrex mixing bowl at the antique store on Fairview Avenue. It’s in the hands of a fat woman in a blue down parka, and she’s holding it upside down, squinting at the sticker on the bottom.

Being Old is No Place for Sissies

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My natural blonde hair is no longer sultry. Instead of a Dietrich look, I now assume a dead on impression of Bette Davis in "What Ever Happened to Baby Jane" some mornings.

How We Send to Anderbo

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She's always sitting in a soft chair watching television with little stars dotting her elbows and lightning bolts on her wrists.

Earworm

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It scraped at Paul’s brain like a cat’s claw at the door. He hadn’t heard the song in years. Was that the Searchers? The Seekers?

Whatever Happened to Sue Ellen?

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When she awoke in her yard, she poured what was left of the rum into the dead grass. The man beside her lay with fingers curled, a claw she’d found wedged up her skirt when she woke. Tom, she said, his name nonsense, tongues. Might as well have been any

The Temptress

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My mystery woman smiles a hidden smile through her mask, and attempts to seduce me with her eyes. She says not a word, but brings up her hand and beckons me with the classic one finger curl that says, “Come hither.” Her eyes make promises, and she turns:

Threesome

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Six kinds of crazy, he said. That told me everything. It told me enough.

We Don't Need No Education

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“There’s an ill energy that emanates from your precise heart that I find attractive”

A Knobby Thing

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She feels ugly but ready for anything.

1918, 1944, 1991, and now

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Disability is indivisibility—all of us could be its members—unlike its affirmative action forebears who remain underrepresented, even as the groups’ selected contestants prepare to retire early, a distributed group whose specialty is American anthropology

Third Time's the Charm

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No jobs except drinking...

Carmen (from The New Yorker+ a Jimmy Breslin "afterword" from Newsday)

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Every trip her mother leaves it until then: Shouldn’t she look for an apartment in a better area; shouldn’t she try for a job with some future? “And, you know, someday you could get married, Carmen.”