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The Nielsens (part two)

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[continued from part one...]After sweeps, my schoolwork started to slip. I had trouble paying attention in class, and my workbooks and tests came back from the teacher marked in ketchup red ink. I had always been a good student, and this academic…

Neighbors

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“Hear that?” asks my wife Amy. Books in hand, we relax on our flagstone patio. A shaft of late-day sun borrows through the maples' leafy canopy and deposits a dazzling, sunlit pool on Amy's lap. …

a day uptown/a night on the bowery

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in her monestary mission, with her rosary and candles, time holds me here my feet got the travelin' blues but my hands tie old women's bones to my hair

palisades

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Driving up to the Palisades after 9/11 for a meteor shower

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.

Mama's Boys

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A pale face was illuminated by the street light. A voice rasped, “Charlie?” “Do I know you?” “It's Bill.” The side of his little brother's thin face

Woman

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When you move to the music of a woman

The Shared Transgender(er)

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...I told Uncle Lou I thought it (trans-gendering) looked like a thoughtful way of occupying the world. It was a personal triumph, for some individuals, over the destructive affects of denial. Besides, it hurt no one, and it didn’t destroy property. I alw

The Field Guide: Olivetti

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When you last produced writing on a manual typewriter, was it before or after your first sexual experience, or maybe during? Manual or otherwise. Which do you recall with more enthusiasm...

The New Meow

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I'm delighted to report that I've come up with my own school of thought. It's called, "Dress Like a Cat Until You Get What You Want."

Memory Box

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Soft voices in private, in the street, city noise violence disappears she blinks her eyelids and I can hear the lashes intertwine and pull clear.

Guardians

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His toenails were so long they curled under and into the black leathery pads of his feet. They lightly clacked on our linoleum, tap shoes made of thick petrified roots. He didn't seem to mind.

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…

Lens

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Night fell and the photographer slept, one hand between Prue's legs.

HOUSE OF GHOSTS

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The blue Victorian at 1145 White Street shifts in its foundation, creaks, and settles in for the night. The girls are bundled into their beds. My wife, too, has gone to sleep. I’m alone in the kitchen, steeping chamomile tea, coughing phlegm into the wr

Estranged

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He kind of enjoyed living by himself. It was nice and peaceful.

a microcosm

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The right is empty, waiting to receive the load like a catcher behind home plate.

Curtains

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She wants her mother back and all I can give her is this—over and over. She doesn't want my mouth, wants no kissing anywhere even. Just this. Like this—quiet and rough. Quiet because her stepfather is napping in the bedroom next to…

Regarding Bill Yarrow’s Assertion that Herrick Was a Voyeur (Poor Julia: Violated, but Immortal)

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the observation, at the end, more/ important than the being there—

the last thing

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salmon maple syrup horseradish smoke detector the list read, scrawled in purple marker on the refrigerator door.

The Loss of a Child

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I watched as the light fled from your eyes, No slowly dimming lamp,

Arcana Magi Memorial - c.4

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Azure walked through the fog as though she were walking to class. Her hands swayed through the mist and felt the thickness of the cloud through her fingers

Love and Destruction In A '67 El Dorado

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He had her pinned to the back seat, expressing his love. Do you love me? she whispered in his ear. Do you, do you, Jimmy Dale, do you love me? His only response…

Chairs and Mirrors

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There's a mirror in front of me and I thought it was so I could see myself, but I didn't want to see me.

"Fancy Me"

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He stopped the shower and recounted his life, now Kin-less and plain.

Little Pi.ec.es

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I scare my daughter when she sleeps because she thinks I'm going to kill her.

Bogdan

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He was a tenth grade / messiah, famous for acts of attrition.

Laundry List

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• Don’t confuse the virtues of bananas with the virtues of banana bread

The Clock Man's Trouble

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A lowing cow cracked open the darkened room like the yawn of a gravid alien.

... and I liked it!

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... red lipstick shiny in the bar's light, raven-colored hair spiky and toussled. Jen opened her mouth to say something, stickiness of her cherry Chapstick separating with her lips ... and the girl leaned in and started kissing her.