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Office M

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It is a sunny day in the autumn of the patriarch.

Understudy

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All young and loud and big and I swear her face like a lighthouse lamp, glowing—I remember thinking, ‘She’s drunk at nine in the morning.’

Uncle Moscow

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He asked me to bury him in Vegas. Instead, I had him cremated in Trenton.

You Know Who in The Hell You Are Not Playing For (We Are All Performing At Being)

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I've been avoidingyour beautiful fact for years in just the past few hours it seemslike it was the scariest plague on earth. Andit worries me becauseit's something so new that Idon't know what to dowith myself.Yes I wouldn't knowwhat to…

20. Smitten

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Your tunamelt cadence / Sank me to ocean floors

Tuesday

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Only last Friday, he was introduced/ around, smiling, healthy,/ a fine young man.

Kind-hearted Assassin

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The 24-hour Date

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We watched kids tweeze snapping turtles out of the park grass. They dropped them into a styrophoam cup and called it the snap turtle home. When they grow up they will bite your arms off, their father said laughing.

Still Life

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One rainy day I walked to an out-of-the-way section of town where the buildings were old, and the streets were cobblestone.

Language

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this reaching, this striving to love like it's there becoming something we need.

Omen

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The bird sat there some time. Several minutes. My wife and I grabbed out i-Pads and took pictures.

August

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One moustache hair at moustache level on a filmy bathroom mirror. A red velvet spread on a big round bed. Dear Ma: We saw a bearded lady.

Migrants

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She is too stylish to be crazy, is what the migrant probably thinks. And he's right.

One in the Numberless Series of Requiems

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We perform our chosen duty— naming/ beauties and atrocities within

Lamenting Lexiconical Loss

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Neglected long enough, uncalled for/ by the shrinking language of the day,// my words abandon me.

Aloha

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It’s a little known fact that eels are often lost in translation – only the spotted variety, not the striped or the common and certainly not the electric.... I think about that lovely hippie girl and her knowledge of eels, sometimes.

To Do List

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Throw them up there but try to make it look tidy. Try to become a little bit paranoid, just enough that you slightly overestimate how much they think of you at all.

Museum of Everything

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It is the monad.

A Broken Ankle, Canasta, and a Weirdly Sexy Jesus Sighting

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nothing can stop a group of genteel Southern women from a card game, and divine intervention makes one's participation in such an event quite worthwhile

The most tender thing

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Somehow, I have your body, but you’ve gone missing.

Boardroom Bullshit

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Push the envelope

The Accidental Voyeur

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He had wanted to lick lucidity, curl his tongue and take it back inside his mouth, curl it all the way down his throat, let it bulge inside his neck, feel it snake into his stomach, and come out into the netherworlds with warmth and satisfaction.

Letter to the Editor

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Some time ago, I began to write you letters with the idea of helping your newspaper become a more complete map of our little shared world.

Basal Distance

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are you like the rest of us and you disagree with war yes i said i disagree with war and he said only one man agrees with war but he won t go to the war

Strange Disconnect

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The next time I see you, I’m going to pretend you’re a stranger, and that I’m meeting you for the first time.

SMOKE & MIRRORS

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These days I wear a flag pin.

Secrets and Piles of Money

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The dog awakens at the sound of a petal falling, sure that barbarians are at the gate. She opens wide her yellow teeth.

I Don’t Think Her Last Name Was Tucker

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I ran into Tanya at “Pearl's” — maybe it was still called “Big Balls” — over in the Stockyards (Ft. Worth) in '72 and right up front we both admitted to loving honky-tonks and “done me wrong” songs which is why we were there…

Cavity

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his perfect ivory voice telling me i brush too hard. …as if he cared

Wading

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Through feeling her life story, I understood mine, more,