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The Birds (2)

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The birds were stacked up in the branches of a pine tree behind the feeder. Several were sitting on the fence. “They’re massing,” she said.

Through the Looking Glass: Humpty Dumpty 2011

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“When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”

Big English

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I hit the pole near Whited Avenue a year to the day.

Dear Envelope Said the Stamp

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I have no more use for the beautiful words you used to like so much for me tosend you alone. See my feathers donot so much hide me now as giveme away; I tend to feel farfrom home. Forgive me this. Theend jumped by me quicker than anorange flower cricket on its…

The Assistant

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The Assistant is lost again in a grid city. Again she feels disconnected from the world. Where she is the sound has been switched off.

the musk and the drama

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Shame must search the soul, broken, original, with its primitive juices stirred. Moved until now only by the musk, only the stroll you lived with, the worry, the sorrow, the drama – may I never conceal or recover from it! Yes, I might beg or steal the

Waiting

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He grew red-faced at her quiet words, "I'm pregnant."

Glass

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Her bulldozer of a husband died five years ago.

To Explain the Sasquatch Sitter

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And I was going into the visions you get before you go to sleep. And I heard her moan. It was so beautiful. I moaned back. And she moaned again. And I did too. We pretended I guess that we didn’t hear each other. That we were moaning in our sleep.

Burma

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Our mothers died in childbirth. Taken in by the village, our new mothers taught us to wave at the river boats, to sell our trinkets to tourists. They offered us coins of a foreign currency and little pathetic smiles. By nightfall, our fingers bled. Then came…

Thirteen Ways of Nevermore: Arkansas, 12/31/2010

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MIDNIGHT all day. Bleak December. A chiaroscuro, snowing blackbirds. (Pas de cinq mille, in B minor.)

Mirko's Morning

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"Your loss," she cackled, stumbled to the bed in the corner, hummed a tuneless song, and began snoring, too.

Valentine

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"His middle name is Valentine, and when asked about it, he isn't sure why."

Blue Crabs

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The perfect murder, and it’s not even murder.

Pollock's Last Snowflake?

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The question posed a voluptuous riddle. Were these frenzied silhouettes gestures of Jackson Pollock’s dribble?

amaryllis

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On such warm nights when wet sex happens suddenly, please, remember the amaryllis. How they’ll push up out of the ground in August after the first real heat opens the air. I too was born in such weather. Balmy nights when heat lightning beats in the

Paul Shaffer's Gold

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Paul Shaffer and his cloned henchman Mini Paul come rattling through the early morning sky in a modified World War I biplane.

Dinner at the Harmony Restaurant

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Balling my fists, I banged them on the retro-formica tabletop. The taste of pufferfish balls in an oleander-infused reduction with a seaweed and pomegranate side-salad tossed in a geranium-rottweiler vinaigrette rose in my throat.

Momo and Me

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Momo told me not to mind her, but I did. At night, after he'd tucked me in, I could hear him on the phone in the living room, talking for a long time. Early this morning he woke me up and gave me my backpack. ‘Put some clothes in here', he said. ‘We're going on a trip.'

whoring

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I watched myself tilt my head and coyly smile in the bottom right corner of the chat window-the two off-kilter lamps in the room were casting an asymmetrical shadow over half my face.

Three Poems in March, after Baca

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I could love them all, your people, / Learn their differences, speak their tongues, / When there is no one there to hold you / But me, my arms would be wide enough / To hold armies of your need. Do not forget.

If You Are Without Mercy

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"The opposite of fear is not courage but compassion."--Peter J. Gomesyou are going to die amost pitiful death from your own tearsof crushing boredom. Crying overyour self you will probablynever understand how it is asimple blue-capped flower savesthe world,…

Half a Lotus

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An Ayurvedic astrologer tells her that she is a child of India. Is a girl born in Indiana a mistake of just two letters on a Scrabble board?

kroy hearts destiny

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r luv iz gud enuf 4 a tat2

When the Translator Disappears, the Translation Withers and Dies

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She pined for the return of the trans­la­tor who / became mes­sianic in her eyes.

Conjugal Visit

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Sandy stood with three year old Josh, in line at the Santa Cruz County Correctional Facility in Watsonville. They were waiting to visit Tim, who she had met when she moved back to California after breaking up with Josh's father. If you call fleeing in fear…

our notorious youth

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Be aware the dog is king, radiant, emitting many beams, renewed by and restored by his fullness, his satiety. In many ways underlying all our hearts and minds, out of our notorious youth, ever the flower of our flesh on fire like a little reed next to the dried…

Big Secrets

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O’Malley imagined the blissful, narcotic innocence of Toby’s world where soft-shell crabs crawled into people’s mouths and hummed a happy tune as they were chewed and swallowed.

Investigation

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In this way a section of a marsh or weapons testing range, a forest or corporate landscape is transported into his living room.

Questions Dog First Pooch's Kennel Papers

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The White House released only a short-form pedigree certificate, which “breeders” claim bears signs of alteration. “The ‘K’ in the middle of ‘AKC’ is longer than the other letters, like an El Greco on an acid trip.”