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A Momentary Lapse

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She picked the perfect white wine that she poured in the carafe early to give it ample time to breathe before the guests arrived. She thought of everything. The first course would be Asian Carrot-Ginger soup with black sesame seeds and diced green onion

Jazz

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Contrasts of tempo and timbre counterpoint of rhythm and dynamics complicated passages that interweave drifting aerial melodic linestextural, layered the subsuming of the soloing individualist to the collective beauty, the ideal of the gamelan. Then…

Pablo Picasso and Pornhub: What I Learned From Magazines This Week

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Reading magazines this week, I learned that:Sally Field dislikes gefilte fish.(Vanity Fair, 3/16)Pornhub, an explicit-video-sharing site, gets 2.4 million visitors per HOUR. (Time, 4.11.16)There are 641 million obese people in the world today. (Time,…

White Summer Dress

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Light youth that barely touches the ground

Spring Cleaning for Poets

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“Can you do something about that those four stanzas of three lines each at the bottom of the basement steps?” my wife asked. "That's a villanelle I'm working on."

Winter in the Hague

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There is only me and the crooked pavement that leads to your dim tower.

Solitary Lunatics Up On The Roof

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Up top, the sky is like a fist fight- fat lip purple and bitchslap pinks get wilder as the tabs kick in. Those hovering lights are aliens! we assert with insistent like-mindedness from where we sit directly beneath the airport flight path.

Spring Darkness In the Age of Video

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This spring darkness is winding around my neckin the age of video, how many times I've seen her at the zoowith your eyes, as if seeing for the first timeher early morning breath, tripping your woman, your angelas she arrived on the beach when it was still too dark to see…

Harbinger

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Smoke from the oil lamp traced the wall. It gave Nana something to read.

Strawberry Fields Forever

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There is nothing literal about the color of strawberries. It is a beauty too celestial for this world. It can only be imagined.

Butterfly Morning

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We woke up and we were whirlpools of spilt turquoise oil / with wings for flying

So Comes Love

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Her students read their work aloud in class, haltingly, sometimes proudly, and their willingness amazed Miriam. They were immigrants and retirees, carpenters, security guards, Indian nannies, Iranian escapees. She loved their odd word choices, the lack of editorial impulse.…

Urban Skunks

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Urban skunks want to visit your neighborhood and be bold in your neighborhood.

The Fourth Prague Defenestration: 9

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The Third Defenestration happened during the Soviet era, by the apparatchiks. The only thing that saved the people from certain death after being thrown out of the window of the Prague Castle, was an enormous pile of horse shit below, or haufen mist, as t

The Fourth Prague Defenestration: 17

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The next day we were sitting at that same outdoor café on the square, trying to savor a peaceful meal of duck plucked fresh from the Vltava River, when the very same waiter passed by and said, “Bet you wish you had some peeg now, no?” There were camer

The Snake Pit

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They come in my room without knocking and I'm nekkid.

The Gift of the 12th Congressional District of Michigan

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Other men looked up and, rather than feeling pleasantly surprised at the sudden sound of ethereal metal crickets in their presence, left the restroom after hastily finishing their silent shaking. Mitch joined them, feeling like a coward for being afraid o

The Serious Writer’s Obituary

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...was discovered today hanging from a shower outlet in his bathroom...

Valentine's Day: Say it with Chickens

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Love at first sight? Not for me.

Micromanaged Truth

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Let your father stay through that dinner when his mistress needed him, while your mother was on the verge.

Bad Boys

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Her name was Carrie. And yes, it was love at first sight. Yes, she was a client, and you were supposed to keep your hands off the clients. Everyone in real estate knew that. She came into my office and took a seat in the reception area. I had a listin

Butterflies are the souls of dead babies

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When he leaves, she collects all the caterpillars she can find at the bottom of the garden and sits cross-legged in the shade of the buddleia. She makes a hollow in her skirt and drops in the smooth green, the furry black, the red, spotted and the spiny ones and watches as…

Addicts

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He didn't think there would be girlish confidences, hopes, dreams but he is shocked, appalled, by the little boys aging at ten-speed, already wizened old men ready for cancer and heart attacks with toy trucks in their hands, skeletal women beloved by men

Third Shift

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Some great, doubtless precious; some hollow, likely empty; some only shards, but you never know...

To Walk Backwards

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Tom wasn’t crying. A few snowflakes, the first of the season, flittered down and landed on Elizabeth’s new headstone, christening it. Tom didn’t have his topcoat, and he never buttoned his suit. He tried not to shiver. Lynn lifted her face from Tom’s c

Endless

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Endless. I find this story.Beginning. To walk.Repeating. Repeating.The Memory. Of snow.Amsterdam. Rivers narrow.Hearts. Divide.Hands. Emboldened.Patronizing. Unpatriotic.Semblance. House held open.Forging. The ties…

Curiosity

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They call me Curiosity and I am curious. I am also a robot. Please. Don't judge me. Robots are not all stupidly obedient, bubble headed twits with whirring gears, lithium batteries, and nanocrystalline electrodes. I have a temperature. I have self-monitoring…

An excerpt from "Goodbye, Baseball"

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The boys were his biggest nuisance. The unwashed guttersnipes poured into the park early, all shoeless and half shirtless. He only imagined how thick the fleas must be in their thick tangle of hair, of which only two didn’t have covered with a cap with an

Lanyards

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theme songs for concentration camps!?

Under the Stars

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There was once a girl. Her name was April. Her family lived at the edge of a village. When she looked out her second floor window she could see the forest stretch for days. At nights after supper she would lean over her bed; watch the stars in the distance and wish many…