Most recent stories

the absolute pearl of existence

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I see it now. This is like the blind flash of the mind going off inside, where memory begins to make up its own stories. And the women are often drawn, painted, sung about, while the men are not, so often. What is it about us that they cannot resist loo

Parrot

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"Your mother does sailors," the parrot screeched.

take off your shoes

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feet soft as eyelids on the tarmac

Driving Years

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There was a form to it, not reproduction. I wanted to write Moby Dick without a man in it. [I wanted to write Moby Dick with only a woman in it.] But I didn't do it. It's like a seven-year diary, and it did happen. I might write it as memory then.

Oh Captain, Good Captain: Part I

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I once knew a sailor...

My Wife, My Love

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When I died, she said, she was going to have me cremated and put my ashes in the cats’ litter box.

Rat Hunter

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We came to the dump at dusk to shoot rats.

Woman

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When you move to the music of a woman

(4) Caution

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“You shouldn’t have gone inside,” he said, after she told him what had happened. “I know that’s what you’re used to doing here, with people we know. But he’s not from around here. Don’t go back over there, okay?”

Ambitious

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Why do men become explorers? he asked. Because they want to cannibalize the unknown; to leave the chemicals, the furniture (and, yes, the shrew) behind; to make their way hi ho into the brush, whose weeds and lianas remain empty of the exhortations of Jesus Christ, whose…

Duck Sauce

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In principle, Sergeant Brock Lumley resisted superstition, but if you were to stop him on any given day he was patrolling Baghdad streets with his rifle squad and ask him to open the front left ammo pouch on his flak vest, he’d get this look on his face..

Death's Noisy Herald

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Lying there, with the terrible screech emanating from his chest, blaring from his open mouth, he thinks about jet planes and jack hammers and nuclear explosions. He doesn't have quiet thoughts.

Garbage in, garbage out

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Sam tapped the stick against the small mountain of trash bags, a dull thud predictably followed by a dozen rats scurrying out of the mass. He's started to make a personal game of it — seeing how many he can kill with one whack; if he swings hard enough, and in…

Doll Parts

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She’s always had one foot on a pedestal and the other in a gutter.

care & danger

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When Roger was small his two favorite toys were a tiny, squat doll called Care and a rubber millipede.

The Illuminated Dream

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It broke through the surface of the suburban world and shattered it into pieces, fragments of dreams and amazement. She was not the same as she had been a moment before. It was an epiphany she couldn't put her finger on.

The Perfume Of Wisdom

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I give you the rattle of the rattlesnake. I give you a daub of creosote. I give you the metaphysics of glue.

What The Hell Nationality Are You?

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It’s confusing enough to grow up in a place like America, a country without definitive culture, except for ranch dressing and reality TV, but it’s even worse to grow up half one thing, half another, christened a hyphenation of names without connection to

11

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eleven o'clock spills despair all over our bedspread

The Highwayman Teaches Me About Sex and Death

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hooves moon dark latch eyes rope / Bess the landlord's daughter, the landlord's blackeyed daughter / gun breasts dress shame shouts blood blood blood

The Calamity Train (Pulling Seven Cattle Cars):Remixed for the Occupy Yourself Movement

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We believe in our love storyin spite of the ferocious efforts ofserial bankerseverywhere to discourage us from looking our damned nearprettiest if we really feel like it. I meangranted they do do their ugly troll dogimpressions of…

Little People

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If you consider yourself neither little nor big, remember that anything large, colossal, macroscopic, ample, sizable, blown-up, bulky, mighty was once small, lesser, minute, tiny, dinky, gnomish, weeny or lilliputian.

My No. 1

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I remember meeting you many years later.

Tainted Love

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...skinny love, skinned and thinned weak broth love...

writing in loops

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Antique pens better allow an old soul to express what needs expressing.

Butterfly Morning

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We woke up and we were whirlpools of spilt turquoise oil / with wings for flying

Wheelbarrow

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He was ready for the rub. Tense. She could always tell. The legs, the shuffles. He had to be frantic before he would come to her, his own wife. Vanity, fright. She could read him like a book open on the table, turn his pages the way a fish flakes. "It's comfort night,…

The Whippy Guy

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He was the tall, whippy type. Dangerous.

The Man Who Loved Purple

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If it had a surface, he painted it purple. If it didn’t have a surface, he painted it purple.

Better Spent Time

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there is a tunnel / between your skin and the ground / for kisses to crawl