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a microcosm

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

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."

Tornado Diary

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The storm grew in might until it spawned the worst kind of tornado, an F-5 or Finger of God.

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.

Hat Shop Girls

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My favorite was a red bowler, a man's hat, which I never dared wear outside my tiny bedroom. My three brothers wanted it too much to take that kind of a risk. They'd poke me with various sharp objects: the serrated edge of the bread knife, the rusted TV

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

Variation on a Variation of a Mode

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Borges must be so proud somewhere

Found Poem

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The waters rose / on the earth

Those (Beckoning) Lights

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The understanding we made was neatly wrapped up in its own blue tissue cocoon like a neatly rolled joint and dumped unceremoniously into the forgotten past like a plate of leftover digitized lies. The lid was slammed shut. Time passes too tightly. And you …

Bogdan

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

My Affair With Tiger

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Face it girls, you want to claw my eyes out, don’t you? Or whack me across my 36 DD’s with a golf club, am I right? Well don’t blame me if I’m young, gorgeous, full-breasted and obviously the cat’s meow.

My Relationship With Reading

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What if I said; I never liked actually reading?

End of Chapter Questions for an Imaginary Textbook

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Describe how like or unlike a vagina a peach pit is, using no anatomical words.

Etude, Prelude, Nocturne, Polonaise

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proving little more/ than the player’s keyboard dexterity.

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

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…

The MacGowans Flee West

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Some believe the Scots were encouraged to emigrate, hired guns as it were, to Ireland to civilize that population. If that's the case, we would see it as another evil English trick. In any case, we MacGowans are Scots Irish and Protestant.

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.

HUSBAND (opening door & shouting): 'Hon . . . WHAT'S FOR DINNER?'

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WIFE (calling back from kitchen): "Dick Cheney's penis!"

The Great San Francisco Poetry Wars, 19

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His wings were down when he got into the truck. It was a used UPS truck we’d bought from someone in Berkeley, and we painted out the letter “S,” so that it just read “UP.”

The Dead in Paris, Complete

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Did we get Jihadi John?/ And the highway to Mosul?// What’s the score?

Why'd You Come Back?

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But there, up the street, just coming into the corner of the window, someone was in the middle of the road. Walking literally down the middle, dragging one leg like it was heavy or broken, carving a fat line next to the skinny one the good one made.

Laundry List

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

a night on the f'naut

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with images overflowing with delicate thought scenes with nightmarish wet dreams

Zig Zag

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Jerry tries to be funny saying, I think Charlie Brown should kick Lucy in the head when she pulls the ball away; either that or they start making out. Ewww, but they're both eight years old, Sandra says biting her lip, tying off her smile. Jerry won't focus on her…

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—

Please

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"What I need to wear the ring for," I said to myself, "I already got his last name..."

PLAYGROUND

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Marie shrugs. “Maybe she’s just late. Come on, let's wait by the jungle gym.” She runs over and starts climbing. The jungle gym is closest to the path that goes into the woods and down into the canyon. She has to get him into the woods somehow.

Bison

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To make extra money, my father wrote music reviews for the Calgary Herald, and on Saturday nights, he went to hear the Symphony, or into recital halls to listen to the chamber music that was being performed around the city. He took me, once, to a performa

Here be Dragons

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Most nights while in his sleep, with his one good eye deeply shut, the old man can hear the whispers of the specter in the remote wanderings, holding the surrounding woodlands in its snare. The sound of it closing in, with the bones of the universe crushing in…