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The Law of Natural Selection

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Once a student brought him a jar of black widow spiders. Tony put it on his desk. Somehow the jar got tipped over, and the spiders got out.

The Time Broker

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When I finally met the time broker, he sat at an antiquated mahogany desk with no computer. He looked up and waited for me to speak. "Time for sale," his ad had advertised, and I was ready to pay

Fossil Beach

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hiking to Fossil Beach

Finger Weaving A Voyageur Sash

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Night's air awhirl, the sky shoots fireflies. Sometimes, she bleeds black arrows in her dreams.

A Boy and His Tire

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**I think Bridgestone Tire borrowed this story for a commercial. Maybe not, see video and decide.**

Jukebox

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Once a psychologist told me a story

Trio Anomie

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We deny one another, here,/ as long as it’s plausible.

Marcel Unchained

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Street mime in white face and white gloves, trapped in invisible box. Tip jar empty. Marcel's solo-dancing the tango now, teeth clenching ephemeral rose. Passersby pass him by.

Waiting for the Voice on the Line

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hoping for a happy outcome/ like a kindly voice on the line

Six.

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She smiles at strangers,

Portrait of the poet as midwife

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Some poems slip out easily Thick and solid Well-oiled and fully formed

Chaos Unveiled

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The moonlight news is brutal

There's a Panther in my Poodle

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There are glasses in the sinkfrom the water that I drink.And the books in my li-braryare not dumb and ordinary.There's a doggie at my door;did I go to the pet store?There's a puppy on my couch-ywho was happy, now she's grouchy.Was a writer, now an authoror an otter; no, an…

Trader Joe's, on a Sunday

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When you think I'm not looking, I always am. You say it's like nicotine, your best analogy as a non-smoker. The kind of hit that is hard to live without and isn't it human nature, you ponder.

Ghost Questions

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What if I never feel like a real artist? What does it even mean to be a "real" artist? What if nobody ever cares about what I make?

Wedding

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The service was a disaster. The Protestants bobbed up and down. They didn't know when to stand, when to sit. I

Some Kind of Change

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She was flying back in the morning, returning to a long-distance boyfriend I believed she had cheated on while she was here but didn’t ask about because I thought it would have been too obvious and somehow ungentlemanly.

Why I am Afraid of Spiders

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SPIDERS

Parabola Tango

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Is there a recipe for / lasting happiness?

Iowa Voters

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I miss my fire from the first three races

The Guardian

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some precursors of Mantegna

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Light. And shade. Line and shape. Colour, form and perspective. Wall, wood, ceiling or canvas. Pigment in eggyolk or linseed oil. Stroked by brush or spread by knife. On small panels or plastered on vast spaces. All these problems to be worked over and solved. Then …

Three Micros

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The earth moves.

2002 or 3

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She was petite, pear-shaped, white, the girlfriend of a friend who'd done his degree in Russian Literature, but that's not the only reason I liked him. The husband I had for a while traveled whether he needed to or not and so I'd go with Julie and Phillip to movies,…

The Little Things (three versions)

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It's the little things that trip us up: a small hole in a level field, an innocuous root in a well-trod path, a disinclined sidewalk...

A Straw Grasp

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My wife, Sheila, inadvertently clicked my e-mail address, too, when she sent her reply back to him and I read her poet friend's message that her love opened the window of his heart and she replied that his words were knocks that opened the door to her being, then I stood…

Which Way to the Vomitorium

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When I saw that Chez Panisse was serving crawdaddies (the menu called them crayfish, but I know a crawdaddy when I see it), I relaxed. I didn't eat the ugly creatures when my brother fished them out of irrigation ditches back on our farm near Roswell, and

Catalog of Disappeared Things

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He runs a mail-order business from a storefront and distributes a catalog of disappeared things.

Waiting for a Terrorist

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Tents staked in desert land, a muted building of parched earth, in a thirty year old city with a napalm birth, they wait among gravestones in the sand.

Dream Life

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I'm walking you / through Pere Lachaise