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Abu Arif & His Daughters

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I cannot remember what the celebration was for, but the baby was at its center. We passed him around, a sweet smiling boy about seven months old. The age when babies can sit but can't yet crawl and their thighs get plump.

Liebe Grüße

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Left, I see parkland and cyclists and sun. Right: picnic blankets, naked men and lunchtime assignations.

Dairy Queen Lust

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I, personally, just had no interest in having some pimply-faced moron stick his tongue down my throat.

Dig

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Every morning, the children dig holes for their parents. This is both necessary and beneficial: the kids need to dig and the parents have to be buried.

What Is Life?

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He heard her crying out behind the curtain that had been drawn around the bed. Each cry was more strained than the last. She complained about the burning, called the nurses "putane" and threatened to rip out the device they'd inserted into her. He sat t

over me

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What you may see initially could be only half the poem. The rest is hidden.

The Fallen Oak

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Jonas Griffin stared out the bay window as he drank his morning cup, his eyes gleaming with something between wistfulness and disdain at Reynold who sat patiently in the adjacent yard, leaning against the majestic oak tree that towered in its hundred year

Death Hitches a Ride

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We passed a dead cat lying up against a guard rail, its fur stringing and wet and exposing its bloated skin which had a purple tint to it. Not my work, Death said, smoke trickling out of one eye socket.

Arcana Magi - c.13: Along the Way

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The Sentinels flew low and through the woods. Carefully navigating their way around the trees, they heard the sound of birds chirping and frogs croaking in the morning.

Turtles Don't Have Hair

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“You’ll have to do better than that,” Skip says. My husband laughs. He has a high girlish chuckle when he’s truly delighted. He can sing really high like a girl, too. “All right,” I say. I leave my headband

The World's Loneliest Girl

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Turns out it was you. But. You made it into the latest dumping ground in spite of their voted insults. In spite of being told you weren't even going to be around to be danced with. The loneliest girl now looks perfectly trim and trendy to all eyes.…

This isn’t Silverlake anymore

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I hear the slightly scratched voice of Joan Baez coming from the record player singing about the junipers in the pale moonlight, applause erupting like hailstone on a corrugated iron roof. I am singing back through the bedroom wall, wishing the

Just a Joke

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The pizza was perfect, ingredients genuine, not artificial: crust charred slightly; cheese gooey; sauce steaming, requiring careful eating lest the mouth suffer burns. Such quality was becoming rare around town. The product in Manhattan, by and large,

Ways in Which Looks Deceive

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Everything is illuminated. If anyone is watching, we look happy.

What I wanted in 1981

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i stained his hockey sheets right over the red wings

my father's fear

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my father has a phobia of dentists./ he also once felt/ that if the house ran out of toilet paper/ he would lose his job.

A Good Wife

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"How did you know he was a nobody if you didn't look at him, eh? Did you raise your eyes and look him in the face? Are you my wife or a whore?"

That One Time We Were on NPR...

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

Why I Don't Write Sex Scenes Anymore

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I’ve had my face talked off by those types (and I’m sure you’ve met a few) who need to say and hear “special” words, and they go "unh-hunh, unh-hunh, o yeah, o yeah, unh hunh."

Winter Blues

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He told me he could feel an army of tears building up behind his eyes.

Blacktop

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Infrastructure...

That Crazy-Ass Willy Wonka Boat

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I was crouched under a bruise-purple sky on a field of battle. I held a World War I-era weapon, an ancient black-iron spear with a spring, and I was told to load balloons onto it without popping them, and then I was to fire the balloons at some unnamed ta

Pentagon City

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I had been in bed for a couple of days and by this I mean sleeping for fifteen or sixteen hours at a time. I don’t think that I believed in God anymore. I no longer knew how to stay awake.

October

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It's Halloween again, the season when my mother died.

Blues Machine

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Rockin' Joe Heath stumbled into the stairwell in nothing but a black Zildjian t-shirt, shushing himself, trying to see right, pounding head. He recalled the old lily pattern of the wall­paper and something about the tattered edges…

Me. You. Love.

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In my own case, before Ellen, of course there was someone else. She—well, she was someone who I felt as if I’d always known and always would. And I think she felt the same about me.

In My Father’s House There Are Many Murders

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My father said that he had been ready for that journey for many days past and that he had asked often for the spirits to come and take him. He prayed to the god of the heavens and to the earth mother. He prayed for the three of us, and he prayed for the s

What the Dark Matter Says

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There can be no convergence./ There is only the talking that talks about/ an angle of sight nothing else can share.

Unday Morning

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At the Bizarre Bazaar in the village of There You Are we waited on the platform when the Midnight Special steamed into the station pulling a plain brown wrapper disguised as an invisible train

A Traitor of the Better Kind

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Go ahead, boy, pout like a fool.