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Breadfruit

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... we both know how we go to fresh air like fish, gasping.

Summer, 1966

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After my mother died, my father shipped me to my uncle's. He hadn't told me she was dying, so he could just mourn alone.Lena lived next door, Italian, my age -- which was ten -- beautiful. She was watched by goons in black suits. Her parents owned a restaurant. Across the…

Crawl

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Crawl to the dark places I love most, loud music and off key laughter, glimmering green and brown bottles eagerly holding the dim lights overhead inside themselves like ransomed stars.

Wired

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He got up to the pulpit and said that he thought he might have made a mistake. I will never forget the desperate look on his face. He recalled being at his Ivy League school and wondering just what he was interested in upon his graduation and what would b

The Good Son

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They’ve deduced she’s still of sound mind and body. What do they know?

Where I work you cannot see the sun.

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Where I work people use words like leverage. They do not appear to denote anything.

Six Short Poems

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Can't please everyone / Or sail in all directions / Sail on / Stay the course / Still the ill-pleased storms come / To suck the wind from my sails

Love Verse

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A gentle man, and a fierce woman, charmed one another in a shaded gazebo.

"Fancy Me"

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He stopped the shower and recounted his life, now Kin-less and plain.

Seasonal Poem

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One of the poems in my collection, One Day Tells its Tale to Another, published December 16, 2012. Available on Amazon. My first book!

The Spoken World

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The spoken world is bigger than I had ever imagined it to be, wonderful and relentless and unforgiving, and to be a part of it was my grandest childhood fantasy. I don’t know what the world sees me as now, but inside I will always be a stutterer.

Stop It!

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Don’t shout. Be nice Cheer up. Sit up Straight. Don’t play With your food. Elbows Off the table. Watch Your language. Use Your napkin. Eat the Crust Stop fidgeting Stop scratching Close your mouth When you chew Remember to Clea

Him

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Ever since he left, I have been alone with the tree. We had planted it together. A green twig in the middle of the garden and a knotty stick, running around. Fingers and branches have grown. Very fast. Too fast. When he left, I sat in the shade. There I started writing, and…

The Gift

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There is no need to worry about art. Art in its ideal forms stays safe. Real art resists being the object of attention. It directs your gaze, and it swings in you forever.

Strength

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.

Perversion

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“It’s a sad thing,” I said, “when a man has to suffer just for getting a little on the side.”

This Bud’s For You

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I suspect I’ll make the right decision.

Apex

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You left paint and blood smeared on the wall.

care & danger

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When Roger was small his two favorite toys were a tiny, squat doll called Care and a rubber millipede.

An Orange

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I offer you an orangeYou say you'd prefer an appleI offer you an orangeYou say, noI want an appleYou say you had a bad experienceWith eating an orangeHmm, I sayYes, but what does it matter?You say you are not eating the orangeUnder no circumstances will you everEat an…

Anticipation

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before your full lips touch mine.

The Mermaid's Revenge

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Lapping salt beads from/ my crackling, ecstatic lips.

Scared Of Paradise

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It was if you memorized my ever detail but not the why. And perhaps that is what love is. Was that love? I lie in bed waiting for the man who came after you to join me. I hear his heavy footsteps and know he wants to go to Hawaii too, when our bud

Mentors & Manatees

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The loss of my first mentor came as a harsh blow. Roaming the forest with my dog Rosie just wasn’t the same. Her heart was in the right place, but when it came to armed combat, Rosie just didn’t have the goods.

Winter Queen

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Love is

XAM, PARAGRAPH, May 22, 1998, Houston, Texas

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I wrote this paragraph (the first in a series of 14 paragraphs) shortly after Frank Sinatra had died and during my last visit to my boyfriend, M. He had not seen me write something in years.

Two

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i am two / one part me / another part them

Old Soul

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She’s an old soul who was scattered to the winds like a thousand butterflies and a moth She has no center and flits from event to event and can’t miss out on a thing, because crikey, what if she missed something important? And the m

When I'm Sixty-Four (Semantic Satiation)

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Every day is exactly the same.

It's not heavenly light, b!*&#.

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He stopped believing in God when he learned how balls worked. Spermatocytes turned into spermatids and spermatids turned into spermatozoa, the transition taking place in tiny loop de loops called the seminiferous tubules which contain at least three…