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Small Budget Poems

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Toxins make a body happy/ as if acceleration toward// an end of consciousness/ is its own reward.

Bookends of a Life: II

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The clacking ventilator reminds me of ice cubes rattling in your highball...

Black Hole

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The falling may continue// forever.

This Is How You Make The Bed

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He disrobes; shoes, socks, shirt, belt, pants. He smells of hard work. The nude whisper of everything else.

Haze

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Just like D-Ray White’s tapping still bounces off the mountains if the right person is listening, Hasil’s hoots and howls are trapped in record wax like a blood-drunk mosquito in amber.

Introduction and Apology Written Against the End of Time

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They articulate my failings as a human being./ They articulate my greater rage at human beings// here for such a short time and at the precipice already

To See Who's There

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Able to search through centuries, I click, scribble, skim,resurrect wet stone walls, the smell of burning peat.Bob's your uncle; Peggy's your aunt.Name your family, child. My brother said helloto Uncle Shirley and Aunt Greg. I was more…

SECRETS

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they don't tell

The Reward of Work is Harder Work

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If you stop, you starve// and they just offer what you do/ to others, starved already,/ and schooled, as you, in servitude.

The Fuddy-Duddy Writer Reflects on her Fan(s)

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The Fuddy-Duddy Writer does not do wit.

Scottish Independence

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with peaty aromatics, opened,/ and a welcomed sting, swallowed,

blind

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what world is this?

Writer's Envy

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You may think you've tasted envy, but yours was just a sour sip of wine at a civilized wine-tasting. Mine is bottom-shelf, well-brand gin in a biker bar with miss-the-urinal piss stains on the floor.

Sure Thing

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If you ask me I'm thinking I'm just blowing off some steam, some hot air that doesn't add up to the old cliche of a hill of beans. A hill of fucking beans.

Exhale

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It's as if the house knew I was relinquishing my hold on it.

Sunbelt Winter Sketches

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Sunlight and the small wind/ swallow the frost/ on rooftops and windshields

My Date with Edgar Allen Poe

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Now, if someone is tellin' you that she had a date with Edgar Allen Poe, you might be tempted to say, "Hey, sister, what kind of drugs you be doin' for the last two days?" But I swear on my Aunt Boo's chastity belt that's what went down and with my…

Staying With Mattie

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I invited Henry to go out with me and Marge, suggesting he ask Ellen who he dated a while back and who still asked about him, but Henry shook his head “no” and said “out things” were just too boring at our ages — and besides, since his…

Paradise Island

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A man comes out of the waves

Blank Checks

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Then he said something that really made sense, said he kept a blank check in his back pocket...

After getting sober through a bout of Bukowski

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.

A Lesson

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She’s the worst student in my Modern Film class and we’re alone at a bar.

What Noah Joad Was Thinking When They Left Him Behind

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Going to catch Ma a fish. Won't be special like Tom coming home. But she won't have to feed it. She can eat it.

Phoenix Complaining

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I seem to be at a crisis in this cursed writing life of mine[exclamation point] I am too depressed to squeeze another uncannily inspiring observation out of my pert[comma] sassy self[semi-colon] I waiver hysterically between feverish confidence and a pai

nudes

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for a handful of weeks/ my father took me to/ the college of art and design/ downtown/ where i took drawing lessons./

what are our motives

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Do you think that’s a good idea, you said. Sure, I said, as the men coiled up the anaconda and put it in a second truck that had arrived. You don’t think anyone will wonder what our motives are?

Feb 8

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Call it a spell or a prayer or a ritual; it worked.

Misplaced Emotions

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I spent most of those days in my car. Stashed in the trunk was a cache of precious stones, neatly sorted and separated, bound in smooth black velvet inside a smooth black briefcase.

Slut Whore

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Slut Whore has every Barbie on the market lined up sitting on the windowsill along her bedroom wall, and all their best clothes and accessories.

I’m tired of being timid.

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“Later,” I say to the frisky crickets, verbal cash of the eggnog spa, spot of gum…