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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

Receive Death As The River Stone

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Death. That which lays all men equal in the eyes of the earth. Their is one for each of us, a unique snowflake of demise tailor made for every organism that persists in this convoluted game of life.

Second Chance

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He arrives at the appointed hour, driving up the dusty road in his '68 Ford truck. On the side is stenciled “Sampson's Farrier Service.” He parks in front of the barn. Patience watches from the front porch, where she has just set down a…

children

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today on the bus/ a man in his fifties/ smiled at a baby/

Haiku for Jogging

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Haiku for Jogging

Just Kidding

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Your place is extra. No it isn't. It is, baby. The man was as aroused by her discomfort as he had been annoyed by her laugh. She wasn't laughing now.

The Getting of Ignorance

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It was too late to be eponymous. I was happy enough to be an emulator. But even then, my ideas were nothing but re-runs of re-runs. Like a high-school production of Macbeth.

Emma Louise

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Emma Louise is walking over a concrete bridge when she spies, out of the corner of her eye, a man fishing, waist deep, in the river tumbling below. She is thinking that the water must be very cold on this autumn day, when she sees an extraordinary thing.

Exhibit

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Late in the morning, standing in line, clutching a bag of Meow Mix, I listen to the woman waiting behind me. She's having a cell phone conversation about the Treasures of Ancient Egypt exhibit. It‘s in New Orleans, she says, and the kids liked the mummy. I slide…

The Color of Warm and Cold

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Sandra exits her bedroom wearing a bikini. It’s celadon green, though brighter, ‘SW#6705 High Strung’, I’d say. A saturated splash of yellow overtakes its straps.

WANT A JEW TO FALL FOR YOU? TRY THESE FUNNY PICK-UP LINES.

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KOSHER PORN is a new collection of funny pick-up lines just for Jews, written by humorist Sarah Rosen, and illustrated with photos by Tom Stokes. It's based on Rosen's popular dating blog, Porn4Jews. And it's hilarious. Rosen started her blog after a year and a…

Salome Danced

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After we'd been on the highway about an hour, it started to snow. Sammy leaned down to pick up the roach he'd dropped, and we skidded off the highway

Manifesto of ism

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We walk though the streets of London, New York, Paris, Prague, Barcelona, Skegness, inhaling air heavy with metaphors, eyes set alight by the microscopic pyrotechnics of quotidian symbols hitherto debased by the outmoded conventions of a bankrupt civilisation decomposing in…

The Messenger

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Sophie didn't stop for lunch when she worked. She showed up first in the morning and worked through until the last package was delivered. She pedaled from building to building and walked quickly, at just shy…

Love Sick

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Love is a strong word ... When you could have been enough.

Eskimos Happened to Come Wandering By

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Meet Carl. He's six-three, two hundred and thirty pounds. He has light-brown hair,…

Anhedonia (excerpt)

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Things have happened. It’s a given. What, are you crazy? Of course things have happened. It’s the world, for Christ’s sake. Things are happening. I am consistently missing most, if not all, of them.

Bands, Again?

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Monkey Business Low Ceiling Wagging Tongues Guest Sweet Murphy’s Law Kinda Hot Stopit! Freedom Ring Lumpy Oatmeal Better Not Butter Up Grumpy Umpire

Medicine Man

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The scalpel isprescient -- it knows blood before it cuts.Every surgeon is a seer.We start here, just below the neck. The slide of its sharpened silvertouches softly,enters the skin with care; halfthe cut is question,and half an…

Badface Investigates - Being Naked

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I'm completely naked in an unheated basement, about 40 first year university students, most of them female, are staring at my ridiculous waif-like body.

Falling from Grace

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Royce fell from Grace and landed in the fountain surrounding her pedestal. It wasn't the first time Royce had climbed the statue. It was the first time he'd been sober.

Valedictory

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A speech that could not have been anything but earnestly prepared, sweated out under a hot light bulb while june bugs thumped against screens, delivered to fellow graduates, relatives, a state senator, the high school principle, and faculty representatives, all seated …

Brian, Lisa And The Robinsons

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Sometimes you're searching for a family and you don't even know it. Sometimes a family finds you.