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Chapter 1

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“The King,” he paused, pursed his lips, looked across the crowd of eager and fearful citizens of Ki, “is dead!”

What I Do

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I display feelings of great witness and clasp the rails and try not to fall. I try to fit the social rhythms of the garden party. I do not succeed. I pack my bags and go.

The Winds of Time

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Purple fades. Orange into a deeper blue...The deepest blue ever known.

End Scene

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In the fall it is especially beautiful with the blazing orange oaks set on fire against a crystal blue sky. It is here that she frequently daydreams of her demise.

Famous Female Artist

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My dog Alfie and I would get in my van and go out at midnight for a doughnut. Or an éclair. A French cruller, to be exact. Sometimes we would get Blondie's Pizza on Telegraph Avenue near the Berkeley campus, if it got to be too lonely and restless at nigh

Five Million Yen: Chapter 63

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Gringovitch sat on the big leather chair in Olivia’s suite. Before him on a coffee table were the nude sketches he’d made of her earlier that day.

Gerontophile: An Imposition

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His shirt, striped, fuzzy, is of fabric like velour and wreaks havoc with sunlight. His seat faces the aisle, I am sitting forward-faced across the aisle, we are on a half-full city bus, this afternoon.It is a funny shirt so I smile. I am not smiling because of…

"they call me the midnight gambler"

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That night I came as close to getting laid as I had ever come in my life, without actually getting laid, after two and a half hours of intense petting, begging her to go down in the front seat of my car, with her asking: Why? Why, Jerry? Why? That was a

He'd Risen Up

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“Where did this come from?” Greenblatt snapped as he pulled a pamphlet from his coat pocket with the words “Jews for Jesus” on it.

Dramarama and Acid Wash Jeans

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Looking down you wonder, when did I eat pineapple? and Am I really this awesome or am I a facsimile of something that really sucks, even if it's that 'it's so bad it's good' kind of thing? Nope, it's just bad.

When The Conversation Ends

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It was a strange mood, unfamiliar, not one of her usual “I'm busy wrestling with my personal demons” type of moods. She'd been steeped in it all day and I, like a shipwrecked victim reaching out for any piece of flotsam…

Wall talks to wall

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Wall talks to wall. One has a clock, the other a window, the third a cupboard with bandages etcetera. The fourth a door that opens and closes a thousand times a day.Chair is across from chair. Occasionally the one looking for care picks the wrong one to sit in, and there is…

The So White Woods

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The sun becomes hot. She removes her skirt. She is left with a black bodice, with white laces, leggings underneath and a pair of twelve hole Doc Martens.

Concubine from a Japanese Garden

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Conjuring white five-pointed stars. Irreproachable as Winter.Consonant with a new moon. Rising like an anchor.Not one to walk behind. No destinies touch your charities.None signal your transparencies. Shedding words like skin. Cantillating…

The Weight of Need

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In need of help, he bought his first self-help book at the age of twenty-nine.

Everyman's Armful

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She was, they said, everyman’s armful; Bedding down with her was most likely harmful.

A Haiku In Spirit But Not In Form On the Fine Art of Sumo

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Two titans move opposite one another

Dear Mouth

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...you vigorously screamed blasphemies at inanimate objects

Lucky

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Jane worked out of her new husband's suburban house, struggling to remember it belonged to her too. She shook off memories of years in a rented Mid-City shotgun, an old elevated dwelling that still seemed like home. It ended up with four feet of canal water…

The Two of You

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The new kids never even met you. They know the story of you. They will have it by heart by the second week and include the gruesome part in a letter home.

Chalk, Fish and Monkey

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She picked the fish out of the box leaving a pool of mucus and blood slowly congealing on the shelf and dripped it toward the kitchen table. Outside the wind lashed the tops of the poplar trees together and rain sprayed from the barn roof opposite.

Love Letters

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I saw your soul like flesh through négligée, enigma moulding treasure from okay.

Night Visitor

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The tapping of hard soles moves slowly but forcefully away from the front door and toward the kitchen. Johnny looks at his dinosaur as if its spiked tail and plates of armor will protect him. Clip clop. Clip clop. The footsteps circle the kitchen. The bac

Johnny Bruzzone: Pool Hustler

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I was a coward and didn’t want to get killed like Heimley. Heimley was a nut at high school. I saw him myself one night put his hand right through the windshield of this car he was working on, along with a monkey wrench. Sure, he was drunk, but th

Where it is Warm, in memory of Jean Craighead George

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Michael remembered when he would lay awake at night as a child and in his mind escape to the woods.

I've Been Here Before

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I’ve been here before. it wasn’t you though— it was her before you, and then she before her … before you.

consolations from Cold Mountain

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not otherwise employed, writing verse,/ line by tenuous line the substance of pulse./ ―but no one collects unemployed verse:/ self-lacerations must yield blood, not ink.

Directed by Jackson Pollock

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I don't know how to describe it, in the way that it should be.The ghosts of the founding fathersthru subway smoke and traffic light,visions of long before the Dakotasuccumbing to the myth of gravity,dead bodies stuck in water towerson the roofs of cheap hotels,counterfeit…

Hair

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I had a temperature of 105 degrees. I lost all my hair.

Poem: Admonition

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"Why, before the summer has passed You won’t remember her name. . ."