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Where Does Love Come?

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He was rummaging through his giant pile of clothing on the floor, looking for something to wear to sleep. When he couldn't quite tell what was dirty and what was clean, he knew it was time for laundry. Just as he was going to…

Flop-Flip

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Little stuff at first: mistaking their dog for a cat, attempting to start the car with a bar of soap, or using a newspaper to dry the dishes. Lately, he’d been slipping: calling her by his mother’s name during sex, berating his boss for lackluster profit

Trajectory

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Soon the world is on film that is burning.

The Girl Next Door to Andy

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Then there was this short little girl, Jo Ann, who had a daughter and was divorced, who lived next door to my buddy Andy. She told me right after we did it one night that she had always wanted to have sex with me when she was growing up, as a teenager, I

Box Kite

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The box kite floats high over the marsh.

Ophelia

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Her ghost/kept coming back/to Hamlet

Extra Ticket

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My best friend died yesterday. His name was Franklin Seever, but we all called him Lin. It started when we were in Little League. There were two Franklins on the team so Coach, who was my dad, called the fat one Frank and my best friend Lin.

Jill Walks Across the Snow Covered Gas Station Parking Lot, Sits Next to Jack on the Curb and Gives Him a Cigarette

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Maybe adulthood isn't the destination I always thought it was?

Cow & Fly

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If I can eat a cow...

fragments of their lives survive

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Only fragments of their lives survive, like broken Sapphos. I have known them, alleged killer of themselves for the love of a man., but we know this is an invention. The leader of a whole guild of girls, who wrote 7 books of poems. What happened to them

Particle (7)

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By the time he says “I am tired of the smell of pig shit and death” you’ve already lost interest

Lester Young, Grand Daddy of Cool

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Young is credited with the first use of “cool” as a expression of approval, and he embodied the concept in his life and in his playing. His only problem was he was born too soon, in 1909.

to a gregarious stranger

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Three lines.

Across from Margaret Atwood's House

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Been running so long You've been running so long I bet you can't remember What you're running from

Good for the Gander

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“This isn’t fair!” I rail to my late wife. “It’s all right for you, why not me?” She never answers me directly. Not in whispers, or with knocks, or even dreams.

Parsing We

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An excellent plan. Just like old times.

Hammer Had

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They say I'm supposed to see everything as a nail, but I have a silver head. Too soft for bang-bang. Too soft for anything but sitting on a shelf. I sat in her classroom for twenty-five years. She was proud of me and pointed often to the words inscribed on me that I can't…

Wind Calling

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Listening to old friends speak the same way, the same things tells me they have been dead a long time. They are in their form of living, their self, there is no new season of growth. I witness each of them continue on the same path because it is familiar

that whistle of yours

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I heard a story once that said we are all entitled to seven good years. No, wait, that is not exactly what it said. Rather, it was more plaintive and inquiring. The feeling that song gave was more one of asking the question: Wasn’t I supposed to get sev

Myra's Cigarettes

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I know from the experience of too many odd sideways glances that folks are seldom interested in my brand of observation. No one else seems to wonder how many commas there are in the library or how many other people own that exact shirt.

Motley Crew

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Paul had come to Hawaii, like many young haoles from the mainland, to party. Partying proved to be lucrative for him. By early October 1982 he had done well for himself in Hawaii, living in a country house with sprawling lawns that held back the jungle foliage…

A Hundred Feet

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Why I roamed these flats, choir-Like floors of a century forgivenAnd wedded in an XXL gownIs beyond us. Give me something extra, please. This Town rides in like a school bus.

The Queue

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She persisted. “How long have we been here?” A note of anger crept into his voice. “How long? How long? Why …, why ….” He swallowed hard, realized he had forgotten.

A Day in the Life of a Public Transit Mime

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We got a lotta people ruinin' the public transit experience. Talkin' loud on cell phones, clippin' fingernails, even flossing their teeth.

Cousin (from The New Yorker)

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...to know something people around you don’t know can put you outside of them. And then you can’t get back in...

The Town Secrets

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How old is he anyway? 35? Maybe 40? Old—but in a good and sophisticated way. Everyone says he’s good-natured and generous, Mr. John-just-like-a-movie-star-Wagner.

Black Wheat, 3

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(it) looks out at the world from behind a film (it) does not participate (it) is slow to love . . . There is the image And they say they are in the world . . . Blood does not shake their hearts They lie and take your s

dancing in the theater of the soul

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It’s the audacious testicle dancing in its theater, isn’t it? Carrying the legendary names. The bad blood, the jealousy the heart retains, living again under its skin, rarely enlivened by one of its own. There was enough angel in you that we would g

The Bridge

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And the urban sprawl doesn’t hesitate. All around me, I taste the aftermath of bricks, dust and dirt, freshly laid concrete slabs.

(lost love, and longing)

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As has happened many times in my life, I heard his voice in my sleep and I saw him, though only briefly. Over the years I have seen this man I thought was him clearly and known when he was in danger – a car wreck at twenty (I was correct on everything b