1295 5 1
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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…
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1478 4 2
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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.
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1244 3 2
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For a time he documented his facial expressions.
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1157 4 2
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they tried to trick the sun
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1654 3 2
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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.
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1852 3 2
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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.
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833 4 2
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The Pope is too busy shopping for clothes to control your brain.
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976 3 2
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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
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1182 3 2
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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
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1212 3 1
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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.
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1111 3 2
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Rose was the easiest lay in the Fletcher Memorial Home For The Aged.
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1016 2 2
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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.
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1006 4 2
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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. …
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1129 2 3
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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…
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898 3 2
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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.
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1155 1 1
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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
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973 2 2
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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.
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1285 6 1
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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.
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860 2 2
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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…
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1216 3 2
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In retrospect, we should have been a cult.
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880 2 2
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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
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1111 1 0
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Touch these words with your mind. They will create an elephant with an unidentifiable itch.
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1026 3 2
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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
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970 3 2
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Lips touch briefly at first
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930 2 2
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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…
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1089 3 2
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Hope is the thing playing checkers
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1028 5 2
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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
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168 2 1
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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.
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1283 3 1
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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.
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1315 10 0
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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
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