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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…

Sunk

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The weight of my heart dragged me in dangerous directions.

Late Autumn

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Rough sonnet about faded love

Chimera (a wild and unrealistic dream or notion)

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... while I lie, cool as a nectar cream snowball, in my Maggie The Cat slip, painting my toenails a color called Bad Influence

Lingering Over Language

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The mornings he comes in

A Nun Walks Into A Library...

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Library life is full of surprises.

Ante Meridiem

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Still dipped in night...

The Model

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My art teacher hated Salvador Dali.

Dunes

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I went out through another cold still morning erasing my steps behind me not because I did not want to be followed but because I did not want to find my way back again.

Dinner at the Harmony Restaurant

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Balling my fists, I banged them on the retro-formica tabletop. The taste of pufferfish balls in an oleander-infused reduction with a seaweed and pomegranate side-salad tossed in a geranium-rottweiler vinaigrette rose in my throat.