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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.

Scandal, in Eight Parking Arrangements

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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

At the Vet

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The vet sat with a young woman and old man on a bench in the waiting area. The vet talked like a machine-gun, giving post-surgical instructions for the care of a dog as the woman petted the back of her father who was trembling like…

So You Want to Write a Screenplay for a Children's Movie

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For starters, someone must be dead. That’s the golden rule to remember here. And if that someone is mom, you’ve got a hit on your hands.

Driving Lesson

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Just take the mountain curves as tightly to the inside and as fast as surface conditions permit and the road’s edge

Cabana

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On being offered a seat on the Bart train

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Remember when I entered a room and turned heads is my youthful charm a sputtering fire in the hearth

I Wanna Do This

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strobe lights wash me up and down and here is the hottest mad dancer of the early morning black and loaded rushed into a freeze frame ...Also link to the song "Nope"

Three

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Men and their inevitable disappointments—sure, why not?

Meet Your Happy-Go-Lucky Poet

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"Time is an ocean, but it ends at the shore. You may not see me tomorrow."--Bob DylanThey're writing poems, but not for me. Guess I'll write one for my own. For nobody that I know now. It's a pretty lonely world for someone who sings, not you, not with…

Fool of Me

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This no man's island I'm perched high above isn't always so beautiful to the casual beholder of newly printed maps. Oh don't go and get your clouds all wrong. Puffed or thin, everything I say I believe in is a real feeling, until the music dies…