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Variation on a Variation of a Mode

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Borges must be so proud somewhere

World Trade Center

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I can feel the souls of those who perished here They’re still here like old kites hanging in the sky tattered, but they won’t come down or can’t come down just yet because they haven’t fulfilled their unborn promises t

4:45pm, Philadelphia

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He stays a couple of yards behind me as we slog uphill. I try to diffuse the tension with a coy toss of head, slip on wet leaves. My ankle rolls and I splat noisily down. From my new angle his beard looks less stylish—bristles straggle all up his neck. He maintains…

Smashed Idol

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He was the kind of man that I would rather have declawed than date, and then leave him on a gurney, helpless and anaesthetized. Cliff Eames had made me feel that way since we were teenagers. He would never be helpless. …

How Elm Trees Die

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I had felt suddenly lighter and next thing I knew I was watching Leonard Tucker and Sister William from somewhere near the ceiling. I saw myself, too, at my desk, holding my songbook out in front of me like everyone else.

Apollinaire's Trepanned Skull

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It was only when blood began to drip onto the page that he realized he'd been hit.

Paris

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the boredom inherent in living in the suburbs

1993, What I Wanted

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Two-way conversation with God.

Layers on a Cold Night

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Later that night, he lay his shivering children in his own bed, the bed that betrayed and abandoned him just a few years ago. It will protect them now.

Disorienteering

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At night, on these New England roads, there is no light, no pink sodium-vapor glow, no guideposts.

Antenna

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When I squint at her from across the table I can see the waveforms created by her carrier signal.

Wet funeral

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I know now, how she moves without verbs after you crushed her into the river.

The Intercom

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I have never met Joe’s brother, of course.

People Called Our Windows Art

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Mama hung them everywhere. It started with just a few, in our apartment and outside on the brick. She made walls into windows.

forever

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over tea & saltineshe read melike an obituary

The winter I was going to meetings

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It’ll die in there and the stairwell’ll stink for weeks, Greg says in the car. We’re quiet, considering that.

Cupcake Footprint

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once wedding cake under pillows. now fluffy frosting on squashed defeat

Good For The Ducks

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It's dawn. It's quiet on the pond in the Public Garden. The light is calm, the pollution is mild, and everything is still,except for the occasional cruising taxi. It's the beginning of spring-- tulips out, leaves…

Hand and Thumb

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Often we sit in silence and age. We are observers of dust, fashioning ourselves into antiques.

Still Life with a Bottle of Olives

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On the table the image is by Chardin but the puzzle is by someone else and that is what he has dumped out of the box.

Wounded Knee

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“They picked me up in their spaceship about noon,” Austin Grantham says to me while pulling up an apple crate to use as a stool.

Tomorrows Never Written and Subsequent Unrehearsed Memory

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For some, a vertical pattern will evoke prison bars, for others, product bar codes.

The Way Back Home

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500 miles all the way from Omaha nine hours on the back of a flatbed truck

Dakar 1989

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Everyone runs to the plane but me. I get the last seat (middle of 5), crush men’s bags on my way. I’m white & female. They glare.

A Woman Who Watches

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She was a beautiful woman. I don't argue with that. I welcome it.

Quiet City

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I hope you'll have the time to read this before your attention wanders.

Cremains

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I need a different storage solution

Flying Tiger

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I screwed my courage to the sticking point and asked him if he had shot down any Japanese airplanes. He grinned at me. “One,” he said.

Sociopathic Medicine

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True love may last forever, but the most I've ever gotten out of a lab assistant is two years, five months, three weeks, twelve days, and fifteen hours. And he was the exception.

Tattooed Hands

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A 1960’s of walking sugar beet fields to remove the rogue bolters by hand and on other days painting the ironwork of cattle sheds with red oxide. Then a 1970’s when the self-inking explosion of tattoos on his hands and then his body began.