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Friendship

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The routine was this: after getting off from the job at Carpet World in the Bear Run Shopping Center off of I-95, Stephen would wait for Dink to pick him up in his mother's honda. Then they would drive around for a while, usually on the less trafficked ro

The Boy Who Knew Death

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As the sun rose each morning, so did the lonely old man with it; a sad limping figure strolling across the front lawn with a cigar tucked in his mouth, lighting fresh candles here and there, perhaps on an imagined grave of some loved one long lost to the infirmity of time…

In the Minor Basilica of the Black Nazarene, Wednesday

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In Quiapo Church, Manila, / I crossed the aisle between pews on my knees, // along with old men and women / with desperate wishes, like myself

Mockingbird, Mockingbird

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I remember when I first came to California, I heard a mockingbird sitting in a tree, calling out in the names of other birds. It was down in L.A. I was staying at my brother's house in San Gabriel and driving in every day to the campus at UCLA to go to s

Please Blow Me.

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[TURN-ONS: willingness. TURN-OFFS: rejection.]

Égalité in Equal Measures

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Guillaume and Marcel rolled the headless body into its own wicker basket and were conferring with Lorbert about the disposition of the bodies and their heads, when Marcel noticed a short fellow with a grim sneer and a measuring rod . . .

Two Little Words

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I'll never be a Republican Megadonor or a Doomed Aviatrix. But I'm okay with that.

At the Jennifer Aniston Intensive Haircare Clinic

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Hunger only makes people hungry, but bad hair can ruin your whole day.

How To Write Funny

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I've never really been impressed with authors that write long teary-eyed novels about people dying of terrible diseases or uplifting stories about the armless boy who made the wrestling team.

Tadpoles

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Whole frogs are/ too difficult.

How to Remember Important Things

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Save the whales. Save the dolphins. Save the bored housewives. Save my hands, so often cupped over the sorrow in being alive. Save the beautiful made-up cherries of delight I feel everywhere in your presence. Save the sprawling…

Advice to the Lovelorn at the Mall

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Beware of shouting Dress Barn, Dress Barn! when having an orgasm And don’t tell him you were seeing Starbucks when you came

The Trappings of the Rabbit

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ill kept secrets for sun and dance, sun and moon-shaped universes in the sky.

Accidents

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And the worse thing was that despite all her misgivings, she found herself getting in deeper and deeper. She wasn't pulling away. She wasn't keeping things casual. She wasn't doing the loathsome though necessary work of demonstrating that there existe

Reflections

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... the rift of losing you was jagged and violent ...

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…

a crushed pepsi can floats down

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These days, even God has a day job.

Raw Meat

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I took Annie to the zoo, and the tigers got out. The little tigers, that is. Cubs. Two of them. The zoo employees scurried about, peeking into nooks and crannies.

needs

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addict for validation and cat tongues

Apiaries

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I’m reading an article about honeybees as I wait for the results of my blood work at the doctor’s office.

Thoughts Recorded By My Wife and Sister Three Days After I Emerged From a Coma (Loaded on Dilaudid)

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Bake sweet rolls and make love to your new wife, fall asleep for three years and grow a beard.

.38

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His name was Gino. I’ll leave out the last name, not that I think it matters anymore. He came into my dad’s gas station on the near North side of Chicago to have work done on his fancy car. I was still a teenager. I accidentally opened the glove compartme

At Play in the Fields of the Lord

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Rothko explored horizons,/ blurring figure and ground/ by omitting the figure.

At Harbour

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Lulls, and the gulls, amid the tides and their tears (And I join their voices and my heart is run), Though each or neither takes no part in my fears, I join no hands with the beach or the years (And the ships slip near plus yon). Held handfast,…

a grey green enamel vase in the rain

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we hover black as carrion birds with a glut empty need seems to me she's fell as thee and knows exactly where we posture anxiously spitting falsehoods on cue twittering like snipes cause there's nothing left to do she might have spent her whole life just

Escape

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Can’t you do anything right?

Doing Time Outside (novel excerpt)

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If you are a family member or friend of a person incarcerated in a correctional facility...

Visiting You Without Her

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I bear the wrong gin. Your air conditioner runs cold. It is either frigid or off, the gauge broken. You are not too old to overlook these things. You can't be choosy, but you will never beg. Just an occasional choice as you settle into this…

Not Writing

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I don't look like other poets. / People hardly believe it when I say / "I write poetry, sometimes. / During lonely evenings."

For One Coach, "Wranting" Isn't Writing

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"The editors at Travel & Leisure are more interested in perks from advertisers than the survival of the human race.”