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Spare Me Another Poem To The Moon

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Your malnourished maniacs choke on gourmet reputations

Forgotten pictures

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She thought she would be happy nowA new beginningA new lifeit wasn't to behe tore up all her nicememories

Breaking Dawn

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This is where he died, she says to me, and points to the damp pavement. Her hair is wet, and slicked against her neck. The humidity is making everything engulf her. The sleep shorts I bought her last July are loose on her now, but between the rain and

The Great Bank Run of 1912

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She bought her first gerbil at the age of nine. She wondered if he would die from endless logrolling. When he died from natural causes, she refused to bury him and kept a distance from the first boy who kissed her--Thomas J. Hobbit. The next year a twister swept…

Smoking Giants

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I think they've always been together, talking amongst themselves about whatever is happening around them. A part of me wishes they'd walk into the cave and disturb whatever is burning it from the inside out.

Worms Shouldn't Drink Whiskey

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I have two memories of my dad. The first is a story he liked to tell: So my old woman came home one day with a worm. She sets the worm on the counter and goes into…

Salmon of Wisdom (novel excerpt, Jimmy Gollihue)

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Honey, you eat this salmon, now

Suicide Consulting Hotline

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We exist to facilitate/ successful conclusions of hopeless lives.

Sitting Shiva

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When he left home to be a stand-up comic, he broke his parents' hearts.

Smoke

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She wanted handcuffs.

Imaginary Friend

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"Where've you been?" the image in the mirror asked. "I haven't seen you since yesterday," she said. "Yeah, I miss you too," he said.

You Were At Your Best with Strings Attached

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You were like a delicate lace that barely mentions the wrist. But you were also at your best with strings attached. Let me say this. If innocence is supposed to be so overwhelming as to do nothing on purpose, not carried away by sensatio

Wattle and Daub - 2

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~ ! ~

Breakdown Lane

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I'm on my way to work the Saturday night dinner shift at Slug's

Off the Record

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“In other words you're going to lie through your teeth..."

Silly Old Man Acting the Young Fool

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The green on your shoulder Is worth all their papery property taxes And then some. They cash in every friendship As if it were nothing more than a Ripened apple for pie. Get rid of The thing before it begins to Rot into some…

Found Poem

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The waters rose / on the earth

Karmic Tide

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Digging in another garden, jumping into another space and time, I impaled a toad on the tines of a garden fork. At first I thought the toad was a clump of clay, stuck to the thick tine, but before I could kick the clay off with my…

When the Germans Were on the Roof of the World

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Flew a Messerschmitt. Drove a tank over people in Poland though not in Prague, and claimed he was never a guard at the death camps.

Du Fu's spring scene

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state a shambles, mountains and rivers endure./meanwhile, the city hides amidst spring's thick growth . . .

Ambassador of Nowhere

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Before you tripped on the third rail, you were like any other: coat a shard of midnight-blue, eyes filled with gratitude but for nothing. You were a lost coyote on a snowy hill. With sad magnificence you wandered, terrorizing passengers who secretly wished to pat your…

How I Left Onandaga County

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So, like I said. Da. I have dealt with the men, when I was a lap dancer. The men they need the….manipulations. I have good hands. They want me to see them naked, their power. Here it is only the women. The massage, the facial, the waxing...

Odds Are

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We're on a bench in the park under some trees close to the carousel when she tells me I can't count on having a career as a professional gambler.

Dispensation

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My life was growing on me like a soft Scottish moss

Zhou Yu’s Train

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Are we like a poem, a short hand of words curtained together, evoking a mood, but in the end, impenetrable? We follow the clues to our lover's heart and what we find isn't him at all but ourselves. We fill every part of his life, every part of his past and even become…

Jeanne's Song, 2010

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I think that I write toward death and to stave off death and to remember the dead and to address what is dead in me.

A note from Liu Xiabo

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I think about the weight of those words—how they are silenced by the weight of stone, by the weight of 11 years in a Jinzhou prison cell,

My Dad was a ditch digger

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men sitting on stoops women earning the rent by working as servants in the rich folks yard

When I Asked You to Sing at My Funeral

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It's because poetry would not do because the fireflies were alive that night, aflame

Wedding Day

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A bride, dressed in white gown and flowing veil, totters in high heels down the uneven pavement past Simone’s Café. She holds a bouquet of red and orange chrysanthemums. Three men, wearing black tuxes, accompany her; one of them holds up the hem of her dr