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The Year Michael Got His Own Page in the Yearbook

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You can use your shoelaces or an Ace bandage. Loop a belt around your neck and toss the loose end over a shower curtain or closet pole. Pull. Try to lift yourself off the ground.

Storytime with E. E. Zulkoski

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...afraid of cancer, fire, floods, famine, being audited by the IRS....the list goes on and on....

How to Cheer Up a Sad Song

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It's one of the most difficult problems of aesthetic philosophy: What do we mean when we say that a song is sad? None of the big names--Aristotle, Kant, Croce–Benedetto, not Jim–come close to answering it.

"they call me the midnight gambler"

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That night I came as close to getting laid as I had ever come in my life, without actually getting laid, after two and a half hours of intense petting, begging her to go down in the front seat of my car, with her asking: Why? Why, Jerry? Why? That was a

Battleship

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You compare the brightly-colored wires sprouting from the bandage wrapped around your stepson's head to a bouquet of flowers. The tech sits in a chair next to Brett's hospital bed and holds up line drawings of common objects: cats, boats, skyscrapers,…

The Funeral

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There aren’t requirements, only expectations. I’m writing this, because, at the time it happened it seemed strange to me. People might think I’m writing because now, it makes sense, right? It doesn’t, I’ll tell you that much. I’ll also tell you what i

No Lions or Tigers, Thank Goodness

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I scrambled back a bit and found my feet after untangling them from my trekking poles. Really should have dropped those when this all started. The bear lunged at me with his teeth and I just barely dodged to the left to avoid getting something bitten of

Ritual

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The dance draws deeper whirling witches weaving rhymes The fire spits fierce in the falling rain soon the spell will spill from secret times

Protection

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You're a good dog, she whispered to him, a good brave dog. Her face was tight with soap.

I heard you were a drinker

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Once we got to my house, Lynda had everything drinkable in the house open and in everybody's hands before I knew it. She tossed down a bottle of my father's beer, then started on a bottle of whiskey that was open. She took a straight mouthful and offe

BLAH BLAH

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I get out of the pitstop at the reststop, wade through parking lot hiphop. Hummers with Jesus Luvs George W bumper stickers, and a subdued slow hurricane of dour obese women in powder blue and tepid brown walking about the place like zombies. And I see t

Freedonian Nights Ring With Songs of Bitchiness

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By day, Ksiusha Milda is a housewife with a one year-old daughter. By night, she is a blues singer of sorts, a practitioner of this country’s traditional folk song, kale.

Appeasement

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No, I’m not at the junior high bus stop. I’m at the dining room table with my parents.

Closest Living Relative

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Uncles. Cousins. Enos. No matter how loosely a net is woven, eventually the strands come together again.

The Incredible Distance Between Sleeping and Waking

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She has almost-black eyes and auburn hair and round brown nipples that are always taut – as though in anticipation. I don’t know what color auburn is. I just know that’s the word that comes to mind when I look at her hair. She calls herself Mama Legb

Man Resting On Tires, NYC

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A man asleep on a stack of tires in front of a tire shop on 10th Aveune, NYC. A store that’s “open 25 hrs,” where apparently time is being manufactured. The unknown new element, the 25th hour, even though the other 24 may have been shortened som

Damp

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I'm a madman. People call me other stuff, but I'm a madman. My name is Roberto Nolasco Bahag-hari. Yeah, I know. It's kinda funny for a name. Friends sometimes call me RNB though I hate that freakin' music. Sometimes people…

der Morgenmuffel

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I sat on the corner of her desk ... Angela Merkel can be a sweetie when she wants to be.

A meditation on mint tins

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And I am reminded of river eyes: The summer we slumbered, Like mummies in the sand

Tattooed Thumb

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A tattoo of a river steamboat, one you dreamed up in your sleep and drew yourself is anchored around your nail bed on your thumb. I paint my nails with regatta sails. The toxic fumes sting my nose. You say you're bored and take out a needle filling it with ink. I watch as…

Mankind vs. The Undertaker

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Her boyfriend is into U.S. presidents and professional wrestling. He is reading biographies of both occupations and says this helps him to appreciate gray area, decisive action. Lives of great men, he explains.

Rats

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She liked this young woman. They’d met two weeks earlier, when the young woman had been walking her pet chicken on a pink ribbon leash.

last attempt at innocence

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When we were leaving to go to the ice rink, Lynda surprised all of us by saying she wanted to come along. She slid all the way over in the front seat to be next to me, while one of my buddies, Miller, who had his eye on her himself, slid into the passen

COD: Extreme Hunger

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Mid-laugh, Mr. Adams caught himself. His eyes welled, flooded with guilt for chuckling at his son's funeral.

Better

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... all my friends are girls; I like opera; I can answer all the questions about male and female ejaculation – without stammering – in sex ed. classes. And Braydon? In boardshorts, tall and tanned and naked from the waist up ...

Airman

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Tent City has gone quiet. There is a deadline. I heard it on the news. I’ve never thought about the word before. How in this place it means what it means.

A Dialectical Digression

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It performs the dialectic that intertwines real and ideal through her mounting concern about being choked to death then eaten by a very large pig.

Sestina McRib

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And now the McRib is back. Two dollars.

Heather.

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Gone Heather, with her hands in her hair, silent for help, over-involved now scared.

What If?

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“Can you adopt if you work for the circus?” I asked her