Most recent stories

Better Spent Time

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

The Deepest Cut

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Smoke is pouring outta my ears! (And outta my mouth and nostrils, but that's normal.) The Fast-o-matic Supermart has changed their coupons. Now you can't swap them for plastic surgery. So all those tubes of New Orleans-style Cottil-i-Lard dog sausage…

Egypt is Wisconsin is...

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Regime is elected officials ignoring constituents, ignoring protestors, ignoring history

The Gift

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There is no need to worry about art. Art in its ideal forms stays safe. Real art resists being the object of attention. It directs your gaze, and it swings in you forever.

Dear Helen

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I watched you knee deep in water with a little boy you were hitting.

A Glimpse

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I am everything she wanted me to be. I am crossed legs, chest out; I am wearing a soft white dress—lacy and completely inappropriate to the Midwest, to 2011, to anything about my existence.

the fine hair on your belly

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On the beaches in the summer the fine hair rose up from under the material of your bikini and swirled around your deep navel, almost invisible to the naked eye, but not to the mind, which imagines everything funneling down into the center of your being,

You, the Correct Other, the One I am Looking For

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You, the correct Other, the one I am looking for, you have exacting standards concerning where things must go.

The Truth Will Out

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sorry I didn't inform you (missing cap) about my trip to Spain, (comma splice)

Fun With Literature, Part Two

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Here are some ideas for stories I have had. 1. A captain of a whaling ship loses his leg to a whale, and makes it is life's mission to find this beast and kill it, and make a pair of boots, belt, and wallet out of its skin. 2. Ten people are invited to stay the weekend at a…

Soon to Be a Minor Motion Picture (excerpt)

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Man, you never ceased to crack me up! If you thought you'd just been called a homo, you probably wouldn't want to try to disprove it by grabbing hold of a naked guy and wrestling him to the floor of a shower room.

The Leap To When

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to pay dues to the calendar year / when a day breaks in quartertime / the stars account for halftone

Forgiving the Governor of South Carolina

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(Originally appeared in Fourth Genre, April 2011) The waiting room of the Rosenfeld Cancer Center in Abington, Pennsylvania is my new home away from home, and I'm eager to prove it. When I step on the ridged, black rubber welcome mat and the sliding…

Infamy

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These were the kind of days children dreamed of. A warm sun shone over Coronado, California. December weather on the island did not prevent outside play. The wind off the bay remained soft, even if chilled. Church let out early. There was time to pla

sing your swan song

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They had to dress normal, my other boyfriends, be beardless, hairless, everything torn away, plucked, shorn smooth, because it elicited moisture on the tongue (when I was with you.) But I grew bored as the day before I first saw you.

The Grape

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I would be reduced to begging on the streets and hoping for a sign of her in soup lines.

The Magician

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He now knew the impossible to be possible.

I will be a child again

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A child in a new world/ by way of the old I won’t remember.

Lire's Children, After the Swans

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our eyes misted white as goatskin

Zurich, 1989

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I do not yet really understand the power I seem to have at this moment. And I am certainly too young to recognize that it will end up being weakness, too.

Composition for 250 mg. Capsule in Yellow and Black

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What you have just experienced is an entertainment of a new type, one made possible by a convergence of the latest advances in pharmacology and technology.

Made in Japan - 2

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My motivation as a filmmaker for traveling to Japan was economic and opportunistic. American military occupation had accelerated westernization and, when Japan regained its sovereignty in 1952, their economy was rapidly expanding. Led by manufacturing and export of items…

This Was Called War at One Time

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The woman broke the law with that scream. I would say that there was pleasure in it, for her. I would also estimate that ten or fifteen men saw it, ten or fifteen men plus me.

Wounded Knee

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“They picked me up in their spaceship about noon,” Austin Grantham says to me while pulling up an apple crate to use as a stool.

The Eleventh Brother, After the Swan

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I turned a maiden to a witch / and back again

Smart Bar

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Everything is painted black that isn’t glass, velvet, neon, or chrome. The club is cold, and the DJ who broke-up with me while I forgot I was stoned is spinning his favorites to an empty floor. Endings have a rhythm. I heard this one coming. I can hear it

I’m Afraid You May Have Made Some

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awfully evil decisions upstairs in your head that could come back to haunt you in your later years;I'm here to report your zooming about hair isn't really one of them. You have found the infernal wheel works in all four directions at once. Good for you.…

Three

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Revocable Love It was easy lying there with My head on her left breast Listening to the strong Business-like beating of Her heart. She looked down and said Quietly, I told you my love Was revocable. I give it To many men and then I take It back. …

Spring Cleaning for Poets

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“Can you do something about that those four stanzas of three lines each at the bottom of the basement steps?” my wife asked. "That's a villanelle I'm working on."

Men Are Beasts

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Now when she speaks to him, he no longer responds with an interrogative but rather a cheery, "You're absolutely right, dear" or "I'll get right on it," or "What a great idea!"