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Read Chinese (from The New Yorker)

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Roy Orbison, Roy Orbison, Roy Orbison, Roy Orbison, Roy Orbison, Roy Orbison—right now that’s all I can say.

Happy Birthday Sian or How to Fall in Love

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I learned how to fall in love, in one hour, watching The Waltons. John Boy fell in love with Jenny. Jenny fell in love with John Boy. It taught me the right way to fall in love. It taught me the right way to let love go. I was 12 years old. It was a lesson I…

haiku not much carved

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pens loaded with ink/exceeding or equal to/my volume of blood.

I Liquidate My Assets

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My businessman does as his nature allows him. He is so cute. All day long he makes deals. He is on his phone most of the time. He raises his voice. “Fuck those fuckers, just do it,” is what he says. My businessman hedges risk on his investments by keeping…

Roadside Assistance

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When it starts looking bad enough, I bundle up and head out the door.

The Darwin Awards

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"People are stupid. They've always been stupid. But these days...." His voice trailed off. "Dumb and dumber, huh?" the Boss asked. Peter nodded.

All the gaping mouths without a voice

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"Mammy, why do they throw sand in our eyes?" a girl could be heard screaming from the 30-foot-deep ravine, Babi Yar.

Fort Stark, New Hampshire

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Sometimes you have to make sacrifices to get where you need to be.

Don't Forgive Me

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of anything if that's the way you feel your love must go down, off its last nut before the big victimizing crash of the end of days and flowers. But watch out for thosethorn bushes that grow from forgotten holes in the ground.…

A Plea for Artists to Be Activists for Women’s Rights: Don’t Explain

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When I feel the sort of longing that sneaks up on me unawares, the sort held for the wrong kind of person that can make a woman clutch her heart in the night and sullies her blood with unwanted dreams in a thinking person's landscape, I hear, too, the deep…

Zurich, 1989

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I do not yet really understand the power I seem to have at this moment. And I am certainly too young to recognize that it will end up being weakness, too.

Assiduity Eleven

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Uzma accepts my invitation for dinner.

When the Time Has Passed to Do Good

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Both his parents saved their pent up Puritan pasts to fill his ears with brimstone clichés. "Idle time is the devil's playground", he would tell me, scrunching up his face, stuffing it full of meat lovers pizza.

The Brother

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I guess it’s extremely difficult to be a decent human being in all aspects of your life.

a poem by Darryl Price restructured by Samuel Derrick Rosen

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.

Down South

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We drank beer and played loose pool, attracted two fun girls, one Jamaican, the other dirty blonde, both of whom seemed interested in only one of the four of us.

Just When I Thought

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Somewhere in the belly of the beast something was stirring.

To Know but not Really

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So strange this feelingTo meet someone I've haven't really metTo know someone I don't actually knowTo desire to learn more but sure I never willTo feel connected not knowing what I'm connected toTo read words, thoughts, feel moved by them, but never hear a voice

when-one-of-your-two-divorcing-dearest-friends-says-Choose-it-turns-out-both-is-not-an-option

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fallout

An Open Letter For Zombie Rights

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We are what we are, and that is zombies.

Sunrises and Borrowed Pages

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I'm sitting on the B-line toward Park, and there is a woman with the same black bob as Mad TV's Miss Swan, and she is leaning the whole front of her body against the whole pole in front of me, and even though there is plenty of space around her, she is pressed up…

Unfinished Journal Entries (which only goes to prove just how unprofessionally untutored I am)

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I could tell you right nowwhat I'm thinking aboutbut that would not be sacrificeenough. Takes all kinds, and youonly listen when it'ssomething you think is instantlyoverpowering. I swear, there's always something not quiteright with you. There's a silly left…

Mark and Alan

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They knew every word. They knew EVERY word!

Rubber-Band Requiem

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“Now we lay you in your grave There was no way you could be saved You hate our lord Jesus and he can tell Which is why you will burn in hell.”

Cry Baby Cry

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The baby will not stop crying. He’s been crying for three hours straight. I’m the worst mother ever. What kind of mother can’t soothe her own baby? The bad kind.

1

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Years ago when the smart of it was as nippy as this one.

What my daughter knows I know or some likely version

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He doesn't call, not even on her birthday. She doesn't mention it or complain. She knows she doesn't have it as bad as some, even in this privileged Triangle of North Carolina. She is white and pretty and belongs to what's left of the middle…

A Walk Down Delancey

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my exposed flu-ridden head

Counting the Stars

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Everybody's trying to just not get killed. Cut flowers. It's an illusion. The grand smell of our deathly beauty. They were so afraid of the ghost dance once upon a burning time that they decided on murder to get it to stop. Those were the days. That's…

a microcosm

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The right is empty, waiting to receive the load like a catcher behind home plate.