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Pen and Ink on Paper

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...ancient answers for new questions.

A smile is worth 1000 teeth

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I was desperate for a social life but I couldn’t go out because I was too embarrassed to smile.

1999, What I Wanted

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Breasts don't make you a woman, but no one told me that.

How to travel with your Demons (4)

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I also understand if you don't think that's fair. But consider this: If she doesn't operate according to those rules, then where are we? Isn't that anarchy?

Smoke

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On his last day of high school Jackie York woke up to the smell of burning books. He didn't know it was his last day of high school. He did know the smoke coming through his rusty window screen was book smoke.

Make a Mistake with Me

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I work in finance. Yes, I have money. Yes, my apartment building has a doorman.

Hangover

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“You wouldn't believe it.” Peter leaned in to whisper. “Don’t let the Kodak moment with the wife and kids fool you. That guy is totally gay.”

Mostly I Want to be Walking

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by myself next to just one wide-eyed moment of wild blued out ocean. You know the one I mean. I don't want to have to speak to you, or even- alone- to myself. I'd like to be left inside the poem it makes me feel without having to get up and pee every…

Take our marriage and replace it with blue cheese dressing,

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the brand we like best and buy whether it's on sale or not. Surely there is another blue cheese dressing that is sold, possibly in San Francisco and made in a Berkeley basement by hippies who scrape together all of their change twice a year and buy cheese from an ancient…

Hemingway for Gloria

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He disliked intrusion and very specifically innocuous intrusion, nice guys, one might say, who tried to be near him to learn something from him or who admired him but who, as in that passage, came merely to disturb his work.

Bad Boys

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You the macho man shuffling one woman out the back entrance to let another one in the front.

Ancestry.comedy

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all paths converge on Africa/ and Eden, and the fall from animal grace

Saw Her

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Just like that. He heard her words clearly from the top floor of the five story apartment building. The unexpected change in weather made it mandatory for him to open his window.

It’s Not Over Until It’s Over

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Heaven’s a blast! It’s like a big summer camp in space...We are the weavers of the tie-dyed sky.

Orange Tears

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Remember me? I am the large, dented acorn you threw at your brother, Ken, during the huge acorn war of 1969. You were thirteen. He was eleven. And the entire neighborhood was in your backyard that day. Steve, Jack, Jerry, Tom, Dan, Jeff, Drew. A bunch of the kids…

Where Time is Water

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Dog time is water. Incidents bob near the surface, fall into whirlpools, sink or drift with the flow.

The River, Once

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once she went to quenchthen she went to scrubnow she collects dead toadsgrinds them with cornmeal to feed her sowsonce she ploughed the land toiled with her face deep in dark soil her back burning in hot sunnow she works in the paper millmaking laminated labels for the…

Summer Flip Flops

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Sal, a finder of misplaced objects notices the sunglasses, flip flops and boxers left on the pathway heading to the beach. They are his gifts today, so gallant is he of these ‘strays’ seeking ownership. He tries the glasses on first and feels dizzy.

Trader Joe's, on a Sunday

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When you think I'm not looking, I always am. You say it's like nicotine, your best analogy as a non-smoker. The kind of hit that is hard to live without and isn't it human nature, you ponder.

Auto Imperative

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I drove to you in April / and you loved me all through Illinois

Three Flash Sonnets

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Poor souls. Likely they'll be poets.

Pirate Ship

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I was a disposable disaster at first, a thousand Light years ago. We sail the seas we're given, and Like all of you I did my best to survive , but that doesn't mean we get To survive it like you. Our course may have blown us Completely…

Cavity

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his perfect ivory voice telling me i brush too hard. …as if he cared

Blood By Pines

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But all that they found at the top was bloody red spatters on pure white snowflakes. And beyond that footprints that got smaller and smaller until they disappeared completely into the spicy green pines.

The Beginning and End of Comedy

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Puberty, for Ellen, was less than an overnight event—yes, she got her period in a more or less timely fashion, but what her doctor referred to coolly as secondary sexual characteristics—namely, boobs—took their damned sweet time in coming.

A Christmas Surprise

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"John is going to love it when he finds out that it pees," Bobby said. Kelly laughed and dropped a towel on the floor.

That One Time We Were on NPR...

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Twelve people in the band, the two women arrive first (arrive on time).

Shuffling Deck Chairs on the Titanic

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He said he'd searched in vain for his wife, Mary, before abandoning hope and the ship in one of the last row boats. He was allowed in because of his experience fishing.

Hollow

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His mouth is a flesh cave where a grizzly slumbers and winter is the blank page of my face.

Safety First

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I am not a gun, but I think I may have pulled a plastic movie trigger in some kind of real world action before, accelerated, pivotal scene, one way or another before, this new frame came into its paranoid view .You see? I am not a plastic water bottle,but I…