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Miss Zoldac's Fifth Grade Class Balloon Launch

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INSTRUCTIONS: To all students, please address your index card: "To the Finder of this Balloon." Beneath that, write something that will encourage the finder to email you back. Then tape the index card to your balloon's string.Happy Ballooning! To the Finder…

Rocky 4

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Rocky looked iron-built, tall and lean, not round like April. Russian lawn ornament, I said, mistaking the thought as mine.

The small of her back

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Hockney

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I wonder if he talks about Hockney to othersor if he just does that with me?And what if I wanted to just brush black circular motions like a long playing vinyl record onto a canvas as I listen to Happiness Is A Warm Gun? And what of it?Do you think…

Resurrection

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Rudely awakened, confused and bewildered, he stood stone silent and watched me flee. I barely managed to keep my wits together, didn't and couldn't pretend that I wasn't running out of his bedroom as if my life depended on it. He wouldn't call me a cab,

In the Woods II

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The neighbor was a little woman...

Peter's Office

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This is Peter’s office. The room is small, and the wood paneling is painted white. Light colors, Peter has been told, make a room appear larger.

Event Particle (9)

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leaves, starlings and other words fall into thickets of orange or green grasses or tendrils or snakes

i can't have

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Hey there little hippie girl, smilin’ to the ears and dripping with scarves, I cherish our friendship. However, every time you take off your shoes to dance at a rock show, hair swingin’ like silk vines in the paradise that is your shaking ass...

Halfsies

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You and she might make love here, next week, and I'll buy my own razor, switch from baths to showers. I shave my legs in my imagination. They, like life, are smooth.

Numberplate

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After she died, clearing out her safe deposit box at the local bank, I found more numberplates.

Sonnet I

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Much as the cockerel crows the break of day/ So, too, has our love similar herald,

Another Irresolute Essay on Lit and Crit

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. . . we agree that formal standards for identifying literary merit exist and are capable of being discerned, not merely of being ascribed. —but is this itself true?

Roy and Ray

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Roy Carver owned a big tire retreading outfit over on the Mississippi.

exile on and off the road

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had I gotten home without knowing it? well . . .

two love tankas

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December scent rains coming down sodden leaves underfoot

gravelortian part 22

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This grey is going to kill me

Crossed Out.

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Follow me around a bit. Let me walk you through the rooms, structures, and clouds of my being that reveal junk drawers of "collectibles."

Nathaniel

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sometimes i have to be in the other room just so i can breathe easy away from you.

September 26, 2016

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whatever weaknesses you displayed// as empathetic human fellow traveler,/ your command of English survives you,// on into the last echoes of the human/ once we’re gone.

The Tamarack Swamps

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Last night, in a tavern called Wits End, we dropped quarters into a console, sized and shaped like an old TV.

Sam and the Planets

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No, she hated the vain, overweight, pathetic, glass-of-merlot-a-day, SUV piloting, Carmen-cell-phone-ring-toned, housewives and consumer sluts that charged through the store like starving hyenas through the fallen, decaying, putrid, corpses of a plague-ri

When Mistakes Are Made

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He also looked at the tv with a detachment he sensed was dangerous and the sensation scared him so he ran into the kitchen and felt ashamed alone in the hot room and trembled.

Killing Dennis Gauda

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I killed him. I know you probably don't believe me, but it was an accident. I'll bet everyone in this room knows Dennis Gauda.... or should I say knew him? He was District Governor a while back. He also won quite a few speech contests. Yes... he's competition,…

Orpheus Today

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It is only seven-thirty but the night is full, gloom seizing Highway 66. There is a carcass on the road, maybe a human, slumped next to an empty ice cream truck. Several stars hang up in the East, drunken constellations scrambling to find meaning.

Getting Out

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“We have flown the air like birds and swum the sea like fishes, but have yet to learn the simple act of walking the earth like brothers.” ― Martin Luther King Jr.

Quel Bordel

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Our friend, M. Dieu-Juste partnered in a used car business with a Vietnamese mechanic, Mr. Tran. Cars however, were not their only venture.

Chinese Jacks

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"Carl, do you think we can fit all of our furniture into that red house?" Jeanne asks. She wonders how easily you could burn a red house down, if a claw foot tub will melt or be left standing in a field of black grass. He reaches for her hair, the dizzy smell…

Surprise!

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We were fleeing hurricane Katrina. We stopped somewhere in Texas at a roadside diner, but found a sign that said it was closed. We were so hungry. All of a sudden as we sat there in our car, the shop's owner knocked on the window and asked what he could g

Peace and Cribbage

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Some things are meant to be repeated