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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…

Disparity

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sacred ground bleached with the salt of bitter tears

Why do I put up with this woman?

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She doesn't even know who wears the Adam's apple in this house.

Plato's Cave

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Mick Jagger and I strolled rue Gabrielle in Montmartre. Our conversation spread from apples to shellfish. We stopped for some oysters. Do you remember a time when books were venerated, I asked? I remember a time, he said, when rock and roll was a fetus in the tank of…

Lines with Billie Holiday

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It is almost as if there isn’t a wedge of wood between us – I can feel him inches away from me. I can’t control the sigh or the tears that escape my body.

Behind Blue Eyes

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“You don't know what it's like, to be an old man, to be alone man, behind blue eyes,” he said to the downtown city sidewalk. The sidewalk said nothing. People with someplace to go rushed by him, not stopping.

The Cusp of Leaving

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She waited on the hot, broken pavement, arm outstretched, her thumb a ticket to a distant, refracted horizon. Waves of heat danced like undulating snakes under the spell of a charmer. She pictured herself passing through them, abandoning the green of home for the…

Origin Story

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My father taught me how to solder and that's when I first started to write. Now, when you hold the soldering iron in your hand and depress the trigger, the tip of the gun heats up. Novices uncoil the solder and place it on the hot tip, but that just results in it…

'Bout Time

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Things I Should Have Done - #2

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I do not trust Shay anymore.

Hygiene

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I peed on Rick’s toothbrush. I nearly repented and cleansed it with hydrogen peroxide in the middle of the night. But I didn’t.

A Skeptic’s Faith in Four Parts

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The universe will fuck you over in the end./ That’s what it does, what it’s good at—

Bitter Bits

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Entropy/ has my number.

The Mitzvah

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There were only two students in the sculpture class: an 86 year-old Jewish woman and myself.

The Strongman Used To Weep

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The Strongman used to weep alone in hissingle dusty tent at night, all of uscould hear him, sobbing, thinking about theone incredible time in his mostlymiserable life he accidentallybrushed his thick arm…

Color Wheel

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I remember the tan guinea pig, dead of dehydration. Through the wire bars of her cage I viewed her body. She lay stiff on her side, stretched out, as if in her guinea-pig dream she had been running through grassland, open and close to the sky.

Signs and Wonders

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Bag worms hang in their cloudy white hammocks. This is the month of webs when long-bodied yellow and black spiders sign their autographs.

Whale Lessons

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Even if your heart is as large as a small car, your tongue as heavy as two grown men—even then—you will have to carry it with you wherever you go.