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Mrs. Smedley's Art Class

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THERE ARE TWO PARTS. FROM PART ONE: (Later the police escort the students out, directing them to keep their hands in the air, as they file out into the parking lot. They wrap Mrs. Smedley in a blanket as she stares out blankly in shock. "How is Linda? Is

This Story Will Break Your Heart

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The first years of her life she had been owned by a bear hunter and trained to hunt bear, a terrible turn of luck for her.

Pleaser

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Yes keeps falling out of my mouth

Viet Thanh Nguyen: Nothing is Resolved

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"I write out of a deep need within myself for beauty. A beauty that I think can only be found through the practice, through the sacrifice over time that's required."

Birthday Makeover

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Iris is beside herself with excitement that the most popular girl in her eighth-grade class invited her to join her circle of friends after school. On the sound of the bell, she charges to the door to be the first out of the room and to race to meet Ange

Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?

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Marcel Proust had never been to a big-box store before. He was dazzled by the sheer size and scope of the store and the seeming impassivity of the shoppers. So many products, so many shelves, such strangely intriguing examples of the human condition. The people seemed…

Midlife

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Even suffering all of these conditions, Louise considers herself one of the lucky ones, as she’s learned there are pills, drops, and creams for all of her problems.

DO NOT STOP WALKING!

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There is coffee to the right and whiskey to the left.

You Pour Vodka In Your Coffee

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I wonder if she is my real mother, if I could get one of those paternity tests and find out if she’s my real mother and if the guy she told me was my father was really my father. I can’t remember him very well, just a lot of him screaming and hollering an

Muffled

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A poem not about fog written in fog with an erasable pen.

No New Clothes for the Empress

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Because I was not sure if the poet had said yearn or urine, I zoomed in on her mouth as she commanded the lectern...

No More Little Bridget

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I spend my time sitting on the back step—poison oak reddening my arm—under the eaves, waiting to escape.

American MEOW

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No American ghosts are friendly. I hate to be the one to break the news to you, amigo. American ghosts speak in blood and smoke signals and guttural cries. American ghosts MEOW.

Kevin Kavanaugh RAPED Deirdre by Swimming NAKED In Front of Her When No-One WANTED It!

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["And you can tear a building down ... but you can't replace ... the MEMORIES ... "]

Like Father

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Over a decade of late nights and alcohol fueled anger, and still, sometimes some image or smell would click the panic button,

line breaks

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I wish

falling, endlessly

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Clouds quickly appeared, in a perfect peach sky. Big, puffy clouds, moving together, formed the shape of a heart.

Putin Flies!

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Rumors stranger than usual were circulating in Moskva. Naturally, they could not be confirmed, but they were making the rounds so thickly that they began spilling out of the capital. “Putin has become a superman!”

OBLIGATORIES

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Tonight's Special

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I didn't arrive at the Wicked Spoon every night in the same mood. Some nights I would arrive under the spell of a generous emptiness, what I like to call the euphoria of futility. Not exactly a state of bliss, but a dazed detachment in which everything is so pointlessly…

Wake

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At my daughter's wake Mr. Aleford, her teacher, poked out his pointy nose, sniffing my cologne. How could I be plastered with this, at a time like this? Well, dear Sir, Two reasons. One, to hide the booze. And two, because my wife and I had made feverish love that…

THE HAUNTED MICROWAVE by Stephen King

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[Boy, was this a hard night!]

Visitation

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Nothing but the motion

Lovely Gilded Scars

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Every Time It Happens

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Every time it happens, I think of Amber Heard and how hard you can be slapped without a bruise forming.

Here, You Cry

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Once a week the kids at school got ice cream and popsicles. You didn’t, you never had ice cream money.

Borderline

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You slipped me the key

The Tertiary Stage (he probably thinks this poem is about him)

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They say his irrational outbursts and insane rantsare the results of untreated syphilis. Well, thatmakes perfect sense to me. I've always thoughtof him as a tessellated spirochete, a narcissistic chancre,festering pustule of a blistered imposthume. And whywouldn't a…

Pain

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My pain is a black pearl hidden in a clean shell.

The Pitch

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This is what I am saying now.