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Unwritten

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‘I love you' said the man at the book signing. He was one of the last. The shop was closing. The staff were starting to turn off the lights. She was sitting in the glow of a table lamp with her latest novel in stacks around her.

An Ugly Man

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On her lunch break, she dumps Luis for Daniel Towens, the ugliest man in the county.

Moon View Mountain Road

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I once read a book of warnings.

Turning Thirty

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It was a year of red, white, and blue bell bottoms, chokers, and mini-skirts. It was not a decade of pink stretch pants, pink sweatshirts, and pink snowsuits.

What the Dark Matter Says

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There can be no convergence./ There is only the talking that talks about/ an angle of sight nothing else can share.

Broken

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We sat under the broken umbrella, its flowered fabric hanging limp on one side. The rain fell softly at the edges of our backs. I kissed his hand, the one without fingers (not a casualty of his job, only of birth). My lips pressed what I couldn't say into his…

Dog Days

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A forgotten sprinkler is going in a neglected flower garden, water overflowing the bent wood borders and flooding the ground on either side.

Addict

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...what will happen to me buying drugs on the street, at night...?

Malady

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When the malady struck and the world fell dark at noon, she and I groped the walls and found our front door. Outside, bewildered, we heard the whine of jets in free-fall, explosions in the imagined distance. And we heard a car — or was it a truck that veered…

Tattoos

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Boxing Gloves for when...

Camp Atheism

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We are not alone, not as alone as we think.

A Body of Water Invites All Things

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My resistance sublimates. There is a long instant of absolute relinquishment, in which I imagine droplets of water plinking into my lungs in a slow, musical fashion, like icicles melting in a perfect cave.

Peach

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He wanted to walk in, take off his scrubs, and not have to look at pictures of peaches.

Layover Memories

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It was a pleasant time, my thoughts were mostly good ones, with little effort wasted on regret.

Don Quixote Flash Cards (Being a small chapbook of poems)

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tiny bits each one found meant something had blown apart. that someone was no longer with us. but somewhere that things were crawling towards unity again. another gun had been fired. would peace always start over? it's funny how it will. a hand…

Diversion

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A landscape has the tendency to take on new dimensions when night comes.

The Blue of Milk

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She said this is our abode and it sounded like a warble and she made a sweeping gesture with her arm and the boy started to cry.

Men Are Beasts

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Now when she speaks to him, he no longer responds with an interrogative but rather a cheery, "You're absolutely right, dear" or "I'll get right on it," or "What a great idea!"

MAIZE

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Now, these explosions announced, political bribes and propaganda weren't going to be enough to push things through. There would need to be survival from blunt force trauma and fear tactics, a relentless forward march

Creep

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Every one of them will tell you I drank so much malt liquor I could barf up a distillery and that wouldn’t be a lie.

Are You Okay?

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Moving is like moving upstream, like swimming underwater against a mighty current. You are salmon people: pink, vulnerable.

Tap Dancing to Voltage

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Tap shoes are the portal to the opening of heavens that will ignite me with the highest voltage of electricity, give me the gift I was meant for at birth. Prophecy.

Rodney & Chelsea

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Chelsea's breasts are more the size of tangerines, but he likes them. He likes that she smells like Fruit Loops and that her front teeth overlap slightly. Her mouth is glossed. He slips his tongue inside.

Advice from Topeka

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... I know all about ax murderers because Elmo, my uncle by marriage to my sister who never had any sense was one. He done killed six women in a farm outside of Topeka in the space of they say three minutes, including my sister and her bingo friends . . .

Tilly Artaud

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After not going out for weeks, I went to a bar and met an electrical engineer, a motorcycle racer who raced in the Black Hills, a Renaissance man, in a relationship with a young married woman, and I told him about the toad.

Great Moments in Blindness

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I am complicit in the darkness

"Leda and the Crane-Daddy" by Bobbie Ann Mason and Meg Pokrass

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Co-written with Bobbie Ann Mason

Greyhound

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I stare, out a dirty window, / into the sanitary blackness.

Counting

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For my father, my best buddy.

Paper Elephants

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Every year people came from as far away as Des Moines and Halifax for Elephant Day. They came to see the elephants.