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My Hollows

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Let me say these words now

untitled

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fallen leaves, broken limbs fron wounded trees

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Once a psychologist told me a story

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Over a decade of late nights and alcohol fueled anger, and still, sometimes some image or smell would click the panic button,

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Even suffering all of these conditions, Louise considers herself one of the lucky ones, as she’s learned there are pills, drops, and creams for all of her problems.

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Her hands are swift and supple as swallows, bouncing off the keyboard in rapid-fire constellations of notes, because she's playing Bach's Concerto no.1 in D Minor, which is busy and prodigal and all over the place. She is Polina Olegovna Osetinskaya, a beautiful Russian…

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unsteady, they try to rise

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Its colour a spectral silver shimmered in the pale afternoon sunlight which glinted on its small red and blue insignia so far from home. The landing stage of the unmanned Viking spacecraft had broken away from the main section on schedule before starting its descent through…

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incoming made of dust

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The first years of her life she had been owned by a bear hunter and trained to hunt bear, a terrible turn of luck for her.

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xxxxxx

Trees and Strangers

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The summer I was eleven years old....

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Once a week the kids at school got ice cream and popsicles. You didn’t, you never had ice cream money.

No More Little Bridget

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I spend my time sitting on the back step—poison oak reddening my arm—under the eaves, waiting to escape.

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You slipped me the key

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Steve Kramer was a brilliant young artist on the scene in New York in the 70s when I was starting out as a writer. He built little electronic dioramas displaying stuffed rats in various bizarre settings. Flip the switch and they would get fried in a little rat-sized…

The Femur

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In the desert, among mauve flowers growing feverishly in the ochre sand, a bone, completely bare. Without underwear, without a shirt, nothing. White as a small cemetery ghost, eroded with age, the weather, the vicissitudes of life. It was a femur. I put it on my desk to…

A Chosen Voice

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While the shadows of lives that once were still hid away, others who survived tried to stand on their own two feet and walk the distance again and tell what happened and what it was all like.

The River

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The sinuous river of your childhood. Do you remember how it slid between your young legs before winding away, making its lively and bubbly sounds. You would have made it light-headed with your games and screams. When you lingered late in the afternoon after school, and you…

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On a business road

The Tertiary Stage (he probably thinks this poem is about him)

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They say his irrational outbursts and insane rantsare the results of untreated syphilis. Well, thatmakes perfect sense to me. I've always thoughtof him as a tessellated spirochete, a narcissistic chancre,festering pustule of a blistered imposthume. And whywouldn't a…

Wake

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At my daughter's wake Mr. Aleford, her teacher, poked out his pointy nose, sniffing my cologne. How could I be plastered with this, at a time like this? Well, dear Sir, Two reasons. One, to hide the booze. And two, because my wife and I had made feverish love that…

Masters

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"... he with much to teach, I who had much to learn..."

Tales Told near Tsmebrovht-5

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“—but although we've catalogued instances of this on other planets, it seems never to've led to the global outbreak of psycho-phrenias and neuro-pathologies as those that plagued the Tiānxiàns!”

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My Summer Vacation

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Apple is apple plum plum that is a kiss without a tongue

Viet Thanh Nguyen: Nothing is Resolved

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"I write out of a deep need within myself for beauty. A beauty that I think can only be found through the practice, through the sacrifice over time that's required."