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She heads toward the end of the island and doesn't look back.

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Her pheromones were working overtime.

Year End Closeout: Buy One, Get Seven Free.

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It’s not that cold but the cold that is/ penetrates layered cloth and soft skin/ to chill the blood in its capillaries

Jared Sampson's Mom

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She died in a car crash yesterday. She was driving down Hawthorne, past the strip mall with the Benihana’s, when her ’05 Corolla unaccountably careened over the center meridian and into oncoming traffic.

Noir

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Upstairs, in a room where some years later, the occupant would be murdered by his lover, I sat in my skivvies in an armchair and wondered if I should call my wife.

Hoss Men (continued)

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"Fax the Beaver" was its last, secret title. The beaver is a dirty trick, and it belongs on the index card.

concession to the shapes of hunger

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(no one need fear timidity in our tastes― / we like trying new things, no matter our hastes!)

Rock Band Days

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There were guitar players, and as happens with talent sometimes, the guitar players were too talented. There could not be places for all of them in a single rock band.

Old Photo, 1948 or so

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I’m maybe only four. Not smoking cigarettes found in street gutters yet. That will come the next year, when I’m five. Maybe when I’m six, and Andy’s five, my pal from across the street. That’s my tricycle parked behind this pack of kids that look to be ne

Turning Thirty

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Of all the authors in the library, it was a wife from Maryland who called out from her marriage dormer I was not to read her.

Cento (Christian Morals)

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Be not a Hercules furens abroad, and a Poltroon within thyself

Them, Not Us

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We hold fast to the bed’s corners, afraid our bodies, these new old bodies, have forgotten how to love in its center.

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4. Hers blocking driveway, his diagonal in grass

Pop Tarts

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The currents of events/ strip the molecules from cartilage,// reverse polarity of ventricles—

The Case of the Phantom Paperclip

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I was sitting on the steps in the entryway to our apartment building taking off my running shoes when I spotted a paperclip on the floor. I assumed it had fallen from the mail that my wife had just taken from our mailbox. Once my shoes were removed, I went down to pick…

Day 1 of Composing the Second Novel

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Washed Up

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At noon on a weekday in the off season, when the trickle of tourists who wandered into the Mermaid Curio Shoppe had died out completely, she walked in with wet hair, leaving tiny puddles on the floorboards.

Resurrection - A Sonnet (for Valentine's Day Massacre challenge)

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Mounds of earth and grassless ground

Relationship S&M

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"Absolutely. I get better at it all the time." he confidently replies. He reminds me that it was all her idea. They were online friends when she suggested it. "She loves it." he tells me again, but I think of her sad eyes as she walked upstairs to tend to

Cleft-Split Rock

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Walking here with you on these narrow strands

Tostoi's Last Fiction: a footnote to a note

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The note was a lie, multiplied through each member of its potential audience....

Ares Considers a Career Change

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Barbarians and savages wore feathers/ or frightful face paint or skin tones// one could recognize and aim for/ with weapons one could feel

The Virus

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It all felt so tentative, he thought. The whole set up. Running water. Electricity. A vast network of instant communication. Food in all the stores. It was the latter that gave him the most concern. He'd never really been hungry. Even in his poorest days, in his early…

Inconsequential

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I write poems as if language matters.

Carpe Diem

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It's true push often comes to shove

More Of My Dark Job History

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In my 14 to 15 year old life in the late 50s I worked as a clean-up boy in the neighborhood butcher shop up on 5th. Ave.,

Gusts

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a girl in a red cap flashes by

Every Day Away From You Is A Gift

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People suck. They suck you down, and if you're not careful, they'll ruin you.

Visions On The Beach

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I walked along the beach today, and there I saw them all; including the latest lost: little Tiven, Tommy, Michaela & my Paul. Grandma painted at her easel, set upon the dune. Uncle Eddie bent in half, laughing like a loon, Oliver growled…

Fly Fishing For Bats

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then something like a shark gnawing on a harpsichord. Her drum kit apparently is an entire laundromat. A pocketful of marbles spilling in rivulets, down a set of narrow linoleum steps, merrily as two warblers splashing in a birdbath. several octaves below