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Diving Sticks and Other Recollections of Public Pools
I once cracked open a diving stick and emptied the sand from it for no good reason. I walk past the fence of the public pool and am hit with a burning sensation within the caverns of my nostrils from the day I first jumped into deep water without holding my nose. Instinct exhales the…
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Bad Business
Habit had me walking home along the trolley rails late at night when no one else was on the road. A girl with a bag hanging on her hip was coming down the hill next to my building. She saw me stepping off the rails and onto the sidewalk. She passed my door as I…
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Conviction
I fell in love with a girl named Conviction. We are inseparable. When I walk, I walk with Conviction. When I speak, I speak with Conviction. Before her I was faithless, with her I believe.
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Yule
Fingers of a lady sitting on the evening train viciously storm the pages of sparkling new book simply entitled Christmas Poems. With a curious smile I peer down from where I stand and remind myself it is the 18th of June.
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Route 8 East (Tralnor Hunting Pt. 1)
“Dude,” Hector Christman pushed through clenched teeth, “that was a cop car.” “No it wasn’t,” the driver shot back, his voice cool, metallic. “That car is always parked there. Trust me. It may have been a cop car at one point, years ago. Now it’s an old taxi cab. Vehicular evolution is a follows: police…
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Eight Last Minutes of Light
The hours behind the sun stretch out to the curve of the universe then turn an inverted trek unto the shadowed earth, the space heater long gone out. Time cannot be heard in outer space. Its needle tip flashes to prick the fringe of fabric the patchwork quilt a chair-bound scientist wove with threads on…
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Temperance of Permanence
She met him when neither of them could stand to be alone. They remedied this by getting together. Now they’re face to face and he’s trying to tell her how now he can’t seem to be with anyone. The tightrope walk between being available and being alone is an act he’s made his own. Acrobats…
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Open Wide | Uber Ride
This one time when I was young the casing of a popcorn kernel hugged a hind tooth in my mouth for the better part of a month. That tooth has a number. My dentist is in her early 30s and she has that early 30s pep about her that most girls that age have forfeited…
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Cinematic
It is a little-known fact that when you look at the back of a movie poster you see a mirror image of the picture on the front. The same goes for how the images look when you stand behind the movie screen itself. Spend enough time in the seats of a cinema, and you will…
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Middleton
Middle age endows its members with, amongst strands of grey, bushels of gifts. Most are neglected, others embraced, but none must go unnoticed. Years accumulate, begging the excavation of long-buried relics—memories tucked under blankets of time. Unlike meticulously dusted deposits of Jurassic carbon, the artifacts of days past have a tendency to uproot hurriedly from…
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Breadth of Breath
Breathing comes naturally. You launch from your mother’s insides equipped with innate survival skills, preprogrammed to do something you will do until the last day you are alive. How peculiar (because the action is automatic) are those moments when you are aware of the ebb and flow of the air you are filtering? You can…
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Measurable Time
INT – A MODEST DWELLING – LATE NIGHT The slim frame of ALEC passes a doorway where a man with grey in his beard sits facing the other direction. BARRY stirs in his chair and calls the figure he hears rustling in the other room to come speak with him. BARRY speaks, inaudibly, to the…
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The Vacuum Dance
Maid and maiden in one, collecting dirt and dust brought down by time itself, is oft confined to her wayward thoughts. No matter the lonely durations when futile impresses nullify her persisting mind, gladness is pinned on her tired heart. Within dusting and polishing and scrubbing and scraping dried food pieces from dinnerware, one task…
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Purporting Romance Mythically
Romance is an exercise in myth building. When a new relationship is on the rise, budding rosebuds are gathered while the wilted are buried away. We pull together moments and save artifacts and write a history for our lives as newly paired duos. We destroy, to an extent, our former lives. We become revisionist historians,…
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Inkwell Reflections for Miss Dickinson
White dress white dress how softly compressed prismatic coordinates printed over a spectrum of threads matching sheets covering the little table and chairs in the upper room of consciousness. White—no color or all the colors at once? All the bright or all the dark the stark dark hair and the pale face pale arms pale…
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Sophisticating the Rudimentary 