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A Night in the Trailer of the Headlining Band

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This Cab Goes Out To The Styx

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“Hey, Buddy,” he says finally, “you were supposed to make a right back there”, and I can see his eyes flash as he reads my ID card on the dash...

The Bottle

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That bottle just sits there in the closet, next to the hats and a box full of old gloves. Years it’s been there. Try as we might, we never open it. We just don’t have a damn thing to celebrate. Who was it brought that bottle into our lives and went and ruined …

Fall Apart Stuff

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He is snoring inside the silo of his throat. The inside there shines golden but that’s not the truth. There is something caught below the gold.

What Literary Rejection Letters Would Mean In The Real World

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I ask for your patience with this form message, as it is part of a system that ensures every submissive ex lover is considered separately, since I am involved in a lot of anonymous sex.

Kitchen Fruit Fly Suicides

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How the hell do these 1/8 inch long red-eyed flying insects wind up in my kitchen anyway?

Imparting Shots

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He knows why I’m here, so he stalls, talking about the coffee, about how it’s a new dark blend from a little shop in The Village, about how he loves the flavor, so rich, but just because a coffee is dark doesn’t mean it’s stronger, that, in fact, it’s the

Grateful

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What I had liked about Harvard before it showed itself in psychocareerist TV appearances and lid-down disingenuous printed psychotopical drills for maintaining crass privilege was the description online of its linguistics department.

Small Boat Row Told Through a Roughed Out Dungeon Window

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The princess knew exactly where to find the annoying gurgling frog of her childhood, but she wasn't wearing the right shoes to step onto lily pads with, so she decided there and then to take a stolen boat out onto that soft mission, all by herself instead. It was a…

Eyes Without a Face

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It's tough when muscle gets in the way of memory. The way pain is the only thing I can remember about certain things. Fifth grade, that's what I think of. I think of pain. Not just abstract pain, not some we'll get to it later adolescent angst or ennui.…

The Bedbugs

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Cockroaches in bed was the last straw. Alicia was sure she’d swallowed one in the middle of the night . . .

Upon Learning the Fetus Has Fingernails

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Upon learning the fetus has fingernails, Missy texts her boyfriend: It has nails! He won’t reply because he’s just left for war, but she does it just the same.

The Arms of the Forest

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Watch me sleep. Say I'm lovely, marbled-white. Pretend my forest is other to me. Pretend I am what you have made me. The sugar-almond starlet. Your virgin. Your treasure to break into. Believe me unconscious. It is you who are the dreamer. Look how those thorny…

Missing Bananas

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He's no fruit lover.

Man

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There’s not enough time because we come back to the things we never learn and forget them.

The She-Wolf of Leningrad

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The heavyset blind woman came into the art opening without a dog or a cane.

The Judge's Wife Part 5

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—Jesus, that bastard has everyone in his pocket.

Surge Of Green

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Already past the harbinger of yellow crocus

God Works Out of A Home Office

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with binoculars neighbor reads screen text:

Desert

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On a trail, Richard and I came upon a saguaro cactus that had dried in the shape of a human figure. Its arms were lifted and its back was stooped. I said, “It looks like my mother.”

This Will Hurt

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He says the medic held a needle/said, “This will hurt,”/and pierced his lung

Credenza

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Now the house is empty of romance except a potted flowering plant from my mother for Valentine's Day. No man has set foot in my museum since I moved here. One man has set foot. The owner's brother to see about the gasket under the toilet. The Comcast installers, twice. The…

Preliminary

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After court, the three of us skipped third period, walked down to the river and huddled under the 6th Street Bridge.

Peppercorns

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Fertile bodies eye/ the space you occupy,/ impatient for disappearance.

Pitcher

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the shape only adhering

Do Not Spank the Truth

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Do not spank the truth Whatever else you do You do not ever Spank the truth If you let the truth be spanked You will be diminished And it will never let you Be finished, instead When you are dead You will dangle in the land Between

Lint Trick

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Those socks? Nope. I'd look like the joker in the commercial, the creep with the pollen issues and the triangular smile. What a genius. It's the part off-screen I can't forget, the part they left on the editing reel. She's crumbling the crackers into her soup, that dry…

The Blankey

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All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. All was confusion in the Lubrecht house. Baby Lubrecht had discovered that his favorite blankey, thought by him to have been lost, was in fact being used by his older sister, Lilly Lubrecht.…

Goatee

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"I'm in a wrestling movie!" you shouted.

Bookstore Reading, Telegraph Ave, Berkeley

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There’s someone in the audience who is immolating himself Cutting his own leg over and over with a pen knife And groaning: “Oh God, oh God” And all I can think from up at the podium is This guy must absolutely hate these poems I am reading