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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.

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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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…

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.

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—

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.

The Mitzvah

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

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.

Bitter Bits

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Entropy/ has my number.

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.

On Mondays, Francesca Takes the Stairs

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The first flight is effortless

Wayward Souls

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Based on length it looked like a note, lacking the deeper illustration found in full-fledged letters, but also missing were condolences and considering the subject, such sympathies might have seemed appropriate: Dear Mr. and Mrs. Madison, Katie is

Death Is No Big Deal.

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The suite of dark rooms/ extends forever./ It’s no big deal.

Trees Today

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are my only real friends. They don't seem to mind my shuffling down the dirty sidewalks without acknowledging their mere scraggly presences like friendly tombstones. They are growing their hair out again. I've noticed that much. We've got a…

Faker

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Jesus came strolling by in his sandally Jesus foot sandals.

Boxwood at Nine

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I am Gloria, age nine, standing with my left hand on the green gate to the yard of the farmhouse that I will always consider Home

Mice

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Short, but true. Damnit.

Sundays

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Momma’s hands smell of vanilla.

I Should Not Have Rushed You Through The Rain

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Mist falls from the opaque sky and splatters crystals in your hair...

Broken Waters

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Nausea

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It’s been a series of bad clams

The Poem Sits at Home and Envies as It Celebrates Music

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Translation’s not required—music/ sings itself complete and comprehensible

Okay, I'm In

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I get what you want done from me. You want the old one two sucker punch that goes straightaway through to the tenderest part of the aching heart, the one that tumbles you out of your old worn out gut wrenching way of living life for…

Done.

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you dug a hole inside my heart and asked me if it hurt

Trout Fishing in America Shorty lives on after the death of his dear friend Richard Brautigan, though sadly

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Maybe, after years of writing poems like letters, he began to notice that no one ever wrote him back.

Past Brutalities

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Seven micros