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Class

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Class (appears in my book Breaking it Down; no journal publication) When your neighbor James Frehley cusses you out for hanging a block and tackle from the silver maple in your front lawn, begin to pull the engine from your Galaxie anyway, smile and nod…

Ninja

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She catches my head in a leg scissors and says for me to say Ninja Uncle. Instead, I bite into her flesh that only remotely tastes like a soft salt pretzel.

Storyboard

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For a time he documented his facial expressions.

Anfal means "to take everything"

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they tried to trick the sun

The Long Grass

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Julius winced, knowing there was no way out. Amy showed him every worm, every insect, every dead mouse she’d found when they were in the fields. She pulled him forward, making his bruised shoulder burn.

The Flight

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Of course, you're eventually struck by the thought that the house you saw on the hill was not your house and that those children and the dog are purely matter for the strange.

Pigeons Have Copied Your Brain

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The Pope is too busy shopping for clothes to control your brain.

the body that has the heat

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Dream, swan, dream of your woman, whenever you get hold of her. Problem after problem lets up under the grip you have. And conquest without plan is what you’ve added to the world. So, share your songs under wild silk, won’t you? I remember there was hel

The Infinite Wheel, Hold That Taxi

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Scientists have discovered what I already did once on dope way back in the Sixties. There are so many other earths out there that they are almost infinite. Now in our other lives we have to shuttle from planet to planet reading our poems. And o

A Life of My Own - 5

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angels give them names of important people, people under the control of evil demons whose influence must be negated at all cost if humanity is to survive into the future and achieve its ultimate potential.

The Blush of Rose

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Rose was the easiest lay in the Fletcher Memorial Home For The Aged.

Day One

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I lounged in my captain’s chair growing a beard. Things continued in this way and then the president called.He wanted to know the meaning of virtue.

Monsters Happen

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Dee startled awake from the dream, sat up in bed and looked around the room. The dream came back--hazy, yet clearer by the second. Dee had been warning the girl in her dream that he was a monster; that she shouldn't talk to him, should stay far away from him. …

Are You A Handywoman? Take This (Not Entirely Serious) Test and Find Out!

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As I was reading “Not Your Mother's Book on Home Improvement,” a new collection of light-hearted essays by (primarily) middle-aged female do-it-yourselfers, it became abundantly clear to me that, unlike the women who tell their stories here, I am not a…

Vanity Among Pigeons

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About four in the afternoon a pigeon began admiring itself in the shiny panel of a car door until another pigeon came along and it quit acting foolish.

Brasita de Fuego

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I still picture her waving her bare arms and hands into the purple bellied clouds above the trees, her crooked smile, the spiraling silver maple seeds cascading soft circles around her determined reach, as though the very tree limbs shaping the sky above

Other Brothers of American Crime, Chapter Fourteen

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An extended account of his criminal exploits for a criminal syndicate of Midwestern newspapers and radio stations hastened a change of career plans.

Sole Music

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You're on the good side of thirty, probably with a little girl or boy of your own sleeping at home, and here you are dragnetting at three in the morning. We're all broken, and the scars we trade are all that remains of our fragile, once complex lives.

Ghosts

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The man and the woman ate dinner together as they did most nights. It had become a habit over the years, back when they had children. Their lives were busy yet they always found time for one…

Camp Lake (excerpt)

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In retrospect, we should have been a cult.

The World Passing By On a Double-Decker Tourist Bus in NYC

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They’ve got the tourists On the top deck of the bus Wrapped up in large yellow Plastic garbage bags Riding through the City in the rain The yellow bags flapping in the wind Yelling in the numerous languages At the top of the world The to

Advice To A Young Poet

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Touch these words with your mind. They will create an elephant with an unidentifiable itch.

Cancer Always Calls Collect -- Part 20 -- Stuck on the Pitch of a Roof

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Little things that kept me going are no longer doing the trick, and venting to someone eventually drives them away. People around you know what is going on, but there is little they can do. They stay away at more than an arms length and you understand. Tr

Biscuits and Gravy

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Lips touch briefly at first

Unguent

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Spilled milk it is --lactate of common desire;water under the bridge, slow-moving, white. So this is what we feed on: the past and present here for the licking.Sweat is water too,for the hungry, and any past will do. Parched mouths kiss just as well as…

Edward Ogle the Dickinson

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Hope is the thing playing checkers

the first time I met Terry

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I remember the first time I met the virgin, Terry (not Mary.) She was in the back seat of an old Plymouth convertible with its top down, jam-packed with raucous high school girls vying to see which one of them could be the most loud and obnoxious, and w

MUNDO MUERTE

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Meagan rides the subway with perfect lips and deep thoughts, looking moody out the smudged window like an actress in a Sofia Coppola film.

White girl/boy angst

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I’m secretly hoping for a huge bouquet, a fruit basket, a pickle jar of urine in a lunch bag on my doorstep, even.

Birthday Music

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It’s been stored away in the cedar chest since my mother put it there in the early 60’s, well, 1962 to be exact. She was a careful woman, but over these many years the bow has flattened, and the wind-up parts have corroded some from non-use. Oh, the