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R.I.P. Ann Bogle

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It is with great sadness I announce the passing of Ann Bogle on February 28, 2023 after a brief illness. Ann was longtime contributor and editor of these pages and a champion of small press and emerging writers.I knew Ann since the late 1970's when she was an undergraduate…

Chatter

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The night before his mother's teeth began chattering.

The Common Cold

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There was dad sitting at the table, wide awake, reading glasses on nose, pen in hand above a Doppler graph of numbers on paper, one of many now-lost theorems, looking up as his son walked into the room.

The Gulf

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My 99 year old mother...

The Goodbye Meets the Hello at the Station

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"You come to nature with all your theories, and she knocks them out flat."--Renoir "Dreaming is free."--Blondie "I can't vouch for my ability to avoid dullness..the odd position in which poets find themselves explains their often-sentimental identification with the…

The Wreck of Me

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“You’re a hard habit to break,” I said. My tongue was flaring. Flirting with nurses was my father’s thing.

Ordering a muse over the phone

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"Well, I'd like to inquire about getting a muse. It says in your ad that you provide muses for people who are creatively challenged by their art form."

October is the month when your dog dies

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Forging

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Taken by agents of the United States of America, Felix Six-Killer grows up at the Carlisle Indian School near Philadelphia, the city of brotherly love. His hair is cut and oiled. His shirts are starched and creased. For months he is startled to find himself seated for…

Landing

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She’s witnessed her mother’s terror on the day of the hurricane, and she demanded for the first time in her life that her mother do something her mother did not want to do.

Gossip

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Gossip Betty Martini divorces husbands when they least expect it. On a seeming whim, she pays a visit to dear Arnold, who keeps her papers handy in his top desk drawer. She initials here and there, signs with a…

Etude, Prelude, Nocturne, Polonaise

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proving little more/ than the player’s keyboard dexterity.

The Color of Sound

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The girl put her elbows on the table and rested her chin in cupped hands and this was for comfort but she appeared symmetrical the way an etheric visitor might and the brightness was just then trying to find a way through an opening in morning dining room…

After Dinner/Ice Melts/A Sage in the Copse

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AFTER DINNER Another cycle gone, wasted. She stares into her bowl of full-fat ice cream (just half a cup a day, every day, for fertility). Beside her sits her husband, building a sundae. When he's done she reaches over, picks the cherry off the top, and hurls it into the…

A Simple Explanation

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You are just another and I am only me. I give you full permission to be everything I don’t want you to be. In fact, I insist.

3 Kids

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There he was, naked and covered in green mud

Epitaph N+1

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We die in order to get some rest

Ezra Stoller

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captured by his lens and plates/ before humidity and hydrocarbons/ smudge the crisp clean lines

The Road to Ensenada

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One of the men leaned over and spit long and dark next to where the dog lay curled. He said something about the senora, and the other men laughed.

The Greatest Narcissist on Earth

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I forgot how masterful you are, way better than a pickpocket. After our meeting, I drove home with one hand. It felt funny but I figured I'd absentmindedly put the other in my purse or tossed it into the backseat with my jacket. In my…

I Married a Werewolf

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It really makes you wonder what else you don't know.

Three Short Fictions

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We were to eat just meat and to become discombobulated over vegetables and bread and not to indulge in sex with strange men—men were all strange once you got used to their distance—were Lincoln logs, poles, boulders and scrub trees.

Control

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I’m afraid

hendecasyllabic moon

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that moon does not think (unless mineral thoughts) . . .

Oh, Fish Eggs!

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A motivational speaker I know intimately cannot abide any form of swearing.

Traveling North

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TRAVELING NORTH Though you are dead now. Though I walk covered in dust through this strip mall in Iowa. I remember the collection of tendencies that led me here. The flat landscape. The blazing heat of cornfields. The landscape and body are one…

Danger Above, Danger Below

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And you know that notion just goes to show...

Salt Thought

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The custard of eternity is scooped into the quantum cone of knowledge and drips out the bottom one lifetime at a time.

Hawk

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Squirrels and mice fear her shadow

The Misanthrope Confesses

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I murdered my inner child/ at 7 and neither denied/ nor confessed the act until now.