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The Bird Nests of Lascaux

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With their brightly-colored bits of found string woven into the walls of their nests to teach their baby birds what the worms of the future will look like. Somewhat like the cave paintings of Lascaux for early man in France, when hunti

Bruegel days, nights by Bosch

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no matter where we sit or how we stare— / all parades now march away to one day.

Albert Walks

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Albert Walks When Albert walks he is astonished. Ripe fruit falls to the ground at his feet, offering itself. The earth's tremor rumbles, celebratory, through his mended shoes and up his shins. The birds darting through the sky above …

Neural

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Then I am wearing a brightly colored raincoat while sitting on a deck among hundreds of tiny glowing spores

Quatrains Written on Stolen Time

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It is the fragrance of decay/ as paint, polymers and dyes/ outgas molecules of themselves

Optimism

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She doesn't think about bad things anymore. She used to worry about nukes. She'd imagine Hiroshimas everywhere. She'd imagine the seas rising, the planet a string of deserts, polar bears drowning, butterflies shriveling. The world…

Pleaser

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Yes keeps falling out of my mouth

Noodle

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Our painter man was killed by a bunch of snotty kids who were making fun of him. A gun went off. What is a noodle to do? He wasn't sitting alone in his world, anymore. Where was his famous straw hat? His trusty pipe? He desperately needed to smoke…

Cheesecake

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Eric was born with three testicles.

Hat, Mouse, Tortoise, Zen

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I try to help my pet-mouse by dangling cheese from a piece of string in front of him. Or by making meow sounds. Sometimes, my pet-mouse wins, sometimes the hamster with the great body.

Napomo 17: April 19 – 24

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There are no inspirations./ There are only the things I like/ and the much more numerous// things I do not like.

Epithelial Sample

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I found my black dot nucleus. School got me in the 10th year with the numbers spilling outta my head, but now I got the cell on my mind. Everybody's floating around this joint all pink and green college clean, yellow face Japanese, or the jet-headed Greeks with their…

We Put a Smile Back on Your Face

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Her voice mail announced: “I’m coming for three days...Make sure the dog hair’s cleaned up, I have allergies.”

The Seagulls at the Parking Lot

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Turningturning the pale grey spot.She sits in her carin the parking lotwith the radio onleaning back picking a thin piece of skin from her finger.Turningturningthe seagulls move aroundand aroundabove the asphaltas though it was the wave,with…

early spring

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the late snow, though not welcomed...

Searching for Mr. Bharath Seshardi

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This tall, very blonde, very female, friend of mine. . . .

Duty

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Two girls, twelve years old, run down San Pedro Avenue past the market, the middle school, seven driveways, their small chests heaving. The smooth soles of their Mary Janes keep slipping on the gravel driveways. Two men in a rust-orange van bear…

O'Hare International Peoplewalk Tunnel

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At step blinding speed we all alight somewhere in the world

I Will Not Be That Woman

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Not today. Even when the Isar rolls so cool and deep and I could wade and wade 'til sleep. Not today. When I have the tablets in a drawer in a box winking chalkily at me. Not today. When the church tower soars and it's bells toll out a seductive beat …

Beauty

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Now, this boy removed his socks in front of me, on the chair beside my desk where I read my books, and said: “My toenails aren’t shaped properly.”

A Year and a Day Then

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Removing the deeply embedded jack-blade frommy naked side, like any slicked-upsplinter, was just a bit jarring on the first bite, on first try, I must admit. I freelydo so now to your frozen-over faces. You made your…

Officer Friendly

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The last time Ray and I broke up, I flew my flag at half-mast. It was the kind of thing that pissed him off. He was very big on flag etiquette: how the flag should be folded, the fact that it should never touch the ground, when to fly it at half-mast, the rules regarding…

The lightbulb explodes

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Some Nature Haiku

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The proud, burly tree / Rests on the now crashed TV / Thanks a lot, nature

Summer Flip Flops

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Sal, a finder of misplaced objects notices the sunglasses, flip flops and boxers left on the pathway heading to the beach. They are his gifts today, so gallant is he of these ‘strays’ seeking ownership. He tries the glasses on first and feels dizzy.

Tierra del Fuego

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my time there was not one afternoon not / one river not one tunnel not one falling

Writer's Cough

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Ok, so I’m sitting here trying to write through a frigging cold. And I. . .Oops, . . . . . . wait a sec!. . . I’m stopped, astounded, stunned between coughing my left lung clear over my keyboard and watching it flopping on the back of my desk. . .

Water, Not Fire

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I'll still want the blinds open and the lights on, to see the papier-mache of our flesh fighting death away to the century mark, even if you only want to live until a ripe eighty-two.

Downtown

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bullets in flight make sharp, snapping noises.

O Fortuna

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This poem begins my poetry collection. It is about the pain and suffering I experienced when I had an attack of two pulmonary embolisms, one in the right lung, one in the left. This nearly killed me. I lived with the pain in my lungs whenever I took a bre