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The balloon of you

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and the mass exceeds the buoyancy/ and gravity pulls you back,

Mixtape

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12. Paper Wings (Gillian Welch) This one's really depressing. Maybe you shouldn't listen to it so much.

War Nurses and Lost Fathers - For Memorial Day

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I have been mother to a hundred soldiers, holding their hands barely knowing their names

Birthday Boy

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"I called him a fucking loser and left."

The Winner

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i never much liked Elvis never did then never do now he was no Kris Kristofferson

Darwin at the Zoo

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This year we have no need of spring!

The First Day

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One sentence

The Woman Who Cut Down Her Husband

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The woman carried a wooden log which was her husband into the house.

The Summer Reading Program -- A Librarian Tells All!

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It's July, which, if you work in a public library, means that the Summer Reading Club is in full swing. The SRC used to be just for kids, to motivate them to read when school wasn't in session. But in recent years many libraries have expanded the program to include…

Chickens

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“Easter’s coming,” my wife says. “Should I dress as a bunny or a chicken?” she asks. She means for the costume party.

Routine

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She could live there forever, in that smokey memory...

Trapeze Artist

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Solitude is such an excellent alternative to suicide.

Some Assembly but No Singularity Required

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The phone rings. The oven beeps./ The locomotive whistles and howls.

Klonakilty

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Magdalena White Herrington praised the lucky stars who’d sent her the Klonakilty ghosts.

Testament (complete)

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Their nouns are few and stark./ Ours are numerous and dappled/ or subtly shaded and shadowed/ by circumstance and possibility.

Here Comes the Sun

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She lies on her stomach by the side of the pool staring into her towel. On her back, I can make out a pastel isthmus, surgery's pink art or charlatan's scab, I can't tell which. She is beautiful as rare roast beef is beautiful.

The Tale of Pregnant Tinkerbelle

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Everyone was shocked when they heard Tinkerbelle was six days gone and had got so heavy she couldn't fly. Who could have done it, everyone asked, but Tinkerbelle wasn't telling. So no one knew. That isn't true. I knew, and in this Declaration I swear I will tell…

Four Brief Poems

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The eyes, luminous and large- each an infinite bright blue ocean Wind ruffles feathers My ego and vanity also/ encourage me not to wear a mask. An aberration/ that general circumstances/ will remedy, and soon.

Arrogant Magnolia,

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ARROGANT MAGNOLIA, the first to open all, poised ten feet above our fuss. …

Throwing Pencils

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I can never tell if he’s drunk or using some sort of substance or if perhaps his brain just doesn’t fire at the pace that we have come to accept as normal.

Flexeril and Hydrocodone and Want

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Flexeril and Hydrocodon... For my back

Trompe l'oeil

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After her grief had subsided, the wife felt immediate relief. / Suddenly she was free to abandon or pursue loneliness

Pastoral Hide & Seek

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The sea dies where a cello torques on sand, leaving me without its compass. An old clock sings.

Still Life in a Bowl

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I sprinkle seaweed over the water and all twelve rise to feed. Two of them went down the hole but knew to come up. A toilet has mouths and caverns, not a bad place at all for fish.

Fear Us, Oh Yes.

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Start now. Make lists. Call long-lost friends. Say what needs saying. Raise hell.

Kill Allan

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I still want to kill Allan, because he now is unseen

The Code is on the Street

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They may have heard parts of it, the memoir in me. Then I took a trip—to New York, though they wouldn't have known where—and when I returned, I was entirely mum unless I had the phone with me.

Coat and Shoes

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Walking in to work from an unfamiliar direction, I saw her, on a street I had never been down before. I was coming from his place, for the first time, after the first time. The first time, but not the first date. That's not me. I'm not one to... not one who... He worked…

Hart Crane Pantoum No. 1

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One must be drenched in words.

Mitzvah (wc:55)

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So, how did they meet? After years and years of starvation and gruesomeness and lack of human contact because there were no humans left, only walking corpses, a woman gently lifted the sixty-pound dead man's penis with a cool washrag and wiped him clean. The dead…