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10 Keys

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Let’s play a game. I’m thinking of a word. Do we have to?

Plucked

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I walked to work back then...

The Telescope

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The man meets a woman while out on his lunch break. She seems nice; they strike up a conversation. Before leaving, the woman gives the man her telephone number. The man goes home and thinks about it. It’s been a long time since he’s been on a date.

The Crossing

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There was nothing to do but dream ourselves forward. Nothing to do but not die.

How We Send to Anderbo

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She's always sitting in a soft chair watching television with little stars dotting her elbows and lightning bolts on her wrists.

Life as a Porno

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It could as well be late night infomercials/ saturating the screen// with medieval looking exercise machines

Driving Old

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I drive old now

I Was A Republican (For only one day, and it was a long, long, time ago.)

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There was gonna be a rumble in our schoolyard. An outright brawl. It was gonna be just like Blackboard Jungle. Only real. Not some movie at the Duwamish Drive-In. Every boy in my school, it seemed like, was lined up outside except me. All the third and fourth graders…

Heart Line

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One sunny morning, a big-bellied ball of yellow fur surveyed a yard full of prospective adopters and ran straight to one. She’d been chosen.

The Wooden City

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Ah, how sweet is forbidden fruit, how delicious undiscovered sin!

Dinner at La Maison Bouche

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The knife that precedes the bigger knife that precedes the spoon that precedes the flat fork, with stuff like that I'm all butterfingers, & even though he's never been to Italy except once to shoot a gun when the world was a great big jumble, he remembers all…

How to Remember Important Things

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Save the whales. Save the dolphins. Save the bored housewives. Save my hands, so often cupped over the sorrow in being alive. Save the beautiful made-up cherries of delight I feel everywhere in your presence. Save the sprawling…

THE SAME STORY

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Our house was big, red brick, with off-white walls that watched over us while we slept, while we prayed for our souls to be kept, while we shared bath water and bunk beds and the secret of the back closet we will die with and never reveal.

My Books

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My books wound you. They wound me / too.

The Witch in the Canyon

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There's a witch in Laurel Canyon.She made Wes a promise.Her bungalow smelled like Parliaments. Parliaments, garlic frying in olive oil. Parliaments, garlic frying in olive, and a freshly opened pack of Red Vines. Wes could have curled up into a ball and fallen asleep on her…

Driving Years

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There was a form to it, not reproduction. I wanted to write Moby Dick without a man in it. [I wanted to write Moby Dick with only a woman in it.] But I didn't do it. It's like a seven-year diary, and it did happen. I might write it as memory then.

The Tongues of Spring

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Another new spring and the leaves

portraiture

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We all build portraits, meaning we all try to encapsulate and thus punctuate time. Why? Because, who among us can swallow eternity whole?

Enough, Trump

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Enough, Trump. We've had it my dear, with your pink ties, your hairs, your swagger, your towers, your money, tempers, walls, bombs, smarts, snarls, pouts and doubts, bigotty bile, and once again, style. We just…

Touching Candy Taylor

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But you know what? You give yourself a fall back plan, you fall back. Not me. I am shooting for the stars and rising high. Next week, I start filming my first feature film. I get to play Tommy Lee Jones’ sexy little stepdaughter. Me and Tommy are g

Off the record

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Writers, hopeful ones, hopeless ones, poets and petty penmen, worked as bartenders, librarians, substitute teachers, anything.

a good ending

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It's twilight

Dead Girl Rolling

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They left me on a gurney for hours...

Authenticity in a Time of Consolidation

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Culture gives what it feels you deserve/ in the cul-de-sac of your time and place.

Ants

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Her husband wouldn’t let her call an exterminator. That doesn't work, he said. The real reason he said no was that he was cheap.

The not so great Popsicle caper

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"Ha ha!" I said triumphantly, "I've got some left and you don't!"

Collect Enough Fragments, You've Got Yourself a Poem

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I. The sun's corona. Empty boxes near the firehouse. Red birth. A bird's lost wing. II. The bitterness of littleness. Apples in a pile.Early love.A spider, swinging. III. A father's harshness.Twelve bills unpaid. Leaves in a crevice. A dream…

Amoco Cadiz

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She'd liked the name of the tanker. The Amoco Cadiz.

In Memoriam

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...even unbelieving prayer muttered with quiet resigned breaths can not foretell or forestall stains...

Take our marriage and replace it with blue cheese dressing,

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the brand we like best and buy whether it's on sale or not. Surely there is another blue cheese dressing that is sold, possibly in San Francisco and made in a Berkeley basement by hippies who scrape together all of their change twice a year and buy cheese from an ancient…