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Small Budget Poems

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Toxins make a body happy/ as if acceleration toward// an end of consciousness/ is its own reward.

Wired

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He got up to the pulpit and said that he thought he might have made a mistake. I will never forget the desperate look on his face. He recalled being at his Ivy League school and wondering just what he was interested in upon his graduation and what would b

Sisters

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What Did We Fight Over?

Scar

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If he doesn't bite, I'm out of here.

Saturday, 1AM

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Tonight, as I ate stale fries in the car, / after getting back home, / my seatbelt still around me, / struggling to keep me in place,

For Your Consideration

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Are there places that words cannot go? Consider words going where they were never intended to go.

Etymology

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In every word there is both music and history. Music from the way sounds come into union with each other, and history in how they get there. There is form too, sure, but I am not a calligrapher. I'm a scribbler if anything. And so my sentences look mo

How To Write a Poem

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an EZ How to Guide in 50 simple steps

Poetic Emmy's #1

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I’d like to thank no one. But especially my first love in life For putting me through hell With all her lies and eternal sweetness Toward all her many leading men While maintaining she was virgin Until she met me. What was the point? Ah, y

Five Million Yen: Chapter 53

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I am beleaguered by duplicity.

Four Death Poems, Written in Blood

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The warrior would prepare for death by writing a death poem. Sometimes the samurai would begin the ritual and write his poem in blood.

El Desdichado by Nerval

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Give me back my / singularity, my tristesse, my photo ID.

You Left Forever Sitting on my Doorstep

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and so I'm staying here where I am a little while (longer). Who knows where the time sleeps? I don't think I'll ever catch up with your heart again. That's the same lame novel approach I'm always stepping into to…

Voice of the Century

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Feminine, safe, though disembodied,/ she shapes your life in ways/ your mother never could.

Opportunity Cost

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What else could I be doing right now,Besides lying on the couch and staring at the ceiling,Looking for patterns in the colors and lines on the tiles?Looking for you,Immobilized,Succumbed to the siren song you sing.Lured to slavery,Yet you are free,Wild,Unable to be…

Conspiracy

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I was convinced that enemy bombers were on the way.

Meanwhile

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I saw/ star shine in/ my silver pail

Mom #2

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We’d sometimes find my mother asleep in her chair outside her trailer at the nudist camp when we drove up. She loved her garden there, even with the rabbits eating her young tomato plants. She used to coax the bluebirds down to the railing of her trailer

Samosely

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If you’re not dead yet, you’ll die of something.

My Uncle's Last Day in Hospice

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In and out of morphine dreams, he flies through the unfinished roof of Illinois sky. Below, matchbox-sized farm machines. A silo becomes his father's thermos, the silver-capped tower from which he stole sips at ten, his first secret. Back …

flash poem

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Why flash?because the moments, the moments, they pass in flashes of brilliancethat shudder, death glow alightand nothing makes sense beyond nowand nothing will help me but meand I am not even enoughnot my thoughts or your nod of assentor even the deep sigh of…

Palinode for a Love That Failed

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Palinode: A poem written to retract something said in a prior poem.

Dirty Deeds

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Mustard stings the corner of his lips. He swipes it away with a finger, and looks closer at the hot dog. The piece of meat is ripped open like a sliced finger stuck in a doughy bandage

The Reward of Work is Harder Work

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If you stop, you starve// and they just offer what you do/ to others, starved already,/ and schooled, as you, in servitude.

White Treasure

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one man's trash

Mom Dream, from the Family Album

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She was trying to hold something, gathering in … lips blue/ black, saying: “I’m all right.” I remember her telling me, over the phone one time: “It’s a baby rabbit, and he was having a picnic. He was chewing away and chewing away. I had six tomato pla

How Bruce Became a Lover of Key Lime Pie

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He consumed the key lime pie, while wearing a lime-green sports bra.

The Vermeer of Shoes

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My flash kept going off. The museum officials are strict about such matters. Sans flash! Sans flash, Monsieur!

The Day of the Dust Devils

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The main street has turned into the lowland of dust devils, with the red sun scorching, continuing to serve the living like a giant blood pentacle.It looks like a heathen ritual invoking an ugly looking God with wings or horns, but beneath the whirlwind of rising…

Table Thoughts

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“You should've let him drown,” she once told me. Doesn't she see that I did? I'll let her drown, too.