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wheat field with cypresses. van Gogh

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There’s no sky like that, with twisting clouds shot up into by cypress trees that are so like dark green flames, leaping out of the earth as if a dark green oily pool were on fire underground, and this was all that could escape, was its essence. And a

Firecracker to the Dome

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pulling my bones apart, fingers are supernatural beings

Someplace Else

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Flish flash, flish flash, flicker of triangle lights. As he deparks, I say, “See that girl?” She crosses at the stop sign with blond hair flip, flash of white teeth: rips cookie from wrapper, drops wrapper on ground. “I bought her a…

Amble

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I sulk across the room to feed you,hold your hand, tell you everything will be fine. It is the right time of night,the light from the street falls onto the chairat the perfect angle. I look at you, gray, shimmering, persnickety. Don't move, thisis just the dust, helping me…

The Game Show Support Network

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Those who have lost at game shows meet each week for mutual support. All is well, until they start disappearing in ways related to their ill-fated appearances as contestants.

Human Movement

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Blobbing the safety tarmac with human glue

Rumination

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I am cultivating a willingness to devour anything. I will eat a chemistry lab. I will eat a perturbation if I can figure out how to cook a perturbation.

Five Million Yen: Chapter 9

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Naked Lady? I know that from somewhere. Then he remembered. That's what they called those old 1930's and 40's Conn saxophones, Naked Ladies. How would Smith know that?

Three Strangers

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As the patter of our passing feet fades.

The First Time Ever I Saw Your Place

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The first time ever I saw your place With furnishings of orange and blue--oo oo oo.

Still

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I wanted only to be still, to become a rustle for a moment of papery fall leaves sighing past one another on their way to the funeral pyre in the front lawn, sweetly fragrant with the scent of death and inevitable decline, fearless in their annihilation, incandescent…

I Kissed a Shirelle

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What do you do when a Shirelle asks you if you’re in the mood to dance?

Section

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In one section of the map C climbs a staircase.

A Bowl of Soup

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Bury my wounded ego Mr Sitting Bull.Keep me from committing suicide Ernest Hemingway.Take me for a ride above the clouds Christopher Reeve.Fly me to the moon Frank Sinatra.Invite me out to dinner Marlon Brando.Give me immunity from Hollywood John Cassavetes.Keep me from…

The Green Glazed Elephant

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The elephant was breakable and I know that my grandmother held her breath every time I went near it, and I was repeatedly cautioned that it was not to be played with only admired. She taught me in her own way, respect for it. She may have commented on the green with a bit…

Trees

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years later, she won’t go near the trees

No.

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i try/to get/up but you prove/your strength.

Campbell & Evans

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He laughed – pictures traveled across his mind of bodies and mouths and the sex and the liquor, he could taste the flesh and the alcohol right then, strong, immediate.

Downbound A

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Fall came early that year. The edge in the air wasn't just the cold, raw wind cutting down the street — the unity and collective embrace briefly shared after September 11th had faded. The weight from…

Five Million Yen: Chapter 64

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Mulvihill suspected, but could not prove, that the connection to all three murders and the three men was a painting

Rot

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Break Time in the Army Corps of Engineers Mascot Lounge

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The Army Corps of Engineers spent $92,000 in federal stimulus money on costumes for mascots such as Bobber the Water Safety Dog.

the spirit of the dead watching. Gauguin

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Listening too much to the night, with its whistles, bright lights of luminescent bursts like leaves on fire, or the raised ear of a cow in the purple mist, or the curled tail of a pig foraging in the night.

Who's Better: Michael Jackson or Shakespeare?

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I looked up “tupping.” It doesn’t have anything to do with Tupperware. It’s Old English for screwing. Just like a professor–make something harder so you’ll get it wrong on the mid-term.

young salesman

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When I was young I bowed with such forgotten politeness, a young salesman, enchanting, in the silken trades. But I remembered the sun also when it was in Hades, which had forgotten to set, or to rise. Peace, also, dangled there by the neck. Such a pre

WHEN YOUR HULL HAS BEEN BREACHED AND THE HEART OF THE OCEAN IS NOT IN YOUR POCKET

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Her heart is the color of fuck. Not the color she'd imagined; the soft pink of parting lips, the fading hand print on steamed—up windows, like Leo and Kate in that fancy car the night it sank. His car was a dented jeep…

Arm

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As I was going into Wal-Mart, a man with a useless arm was coming out. I'd never seen anything like that arm—a dangle-flesh, rubbery thing with no purpose.

Tattooed Hands

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A 1960’s of walking sugar beet fields to remove the rogue bolters by hand and on other days painting the ironwork of cattle sheds with red oxide. Then a 1970’s when the self-inking explosion of tattoos on his hands and then his body began.

Moonlight Thru A Metal Gate

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Like sun-stream through a spider's web I came with nothing left to master, at least nothingtoo abstract. Like moonlight thru a metal gate I emitted what was animal, without ceremony, without fate, only the diagonal, only the hexagonal, only configuration. …

Sonnet II

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When gratitude on lovers' lips rings false/ As flattery by courtly sycophants,/ Take care to well distinguish gold from dross/ So as to gild gladder remembrances.