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Oats and Dinosaurs by B.T. Lowry
Cynthia was rearranging her mom’s yesterday when someone aware came in. She recognized the boy from somewhere. He looked about seven, her age, with a bowl cut. Normal enough, and that was the strange thing; he wasn’t like everyone else in the coffee shop. They were gray and wispy and…
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Bill Evans on Kind of Blue by Jack. B. Bedell
Bill Evans on Kind of Blue The melody off Evans’ keys grows underneath the hornslike a python in a Florida marsh, the notes easy to catch,all prey without trees to climb. His hands feed in the horns’shadows. Cymbals and snare scurry away as he slidesthrough these tunes. Reeds take flight any time his lineflicks near their…
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Gisele Bundchen by Valium Hippy
mechanic robot walking down the streetssad eyes, broken heartedeveryone sees the beauty in it but methey think to themselves“what a glamorous way to go navigate life!” i knowi’m a mannequin of sufferingand with cigarettes on my nicotine-stained fingersand bruises on my thighsit looks so romantic, as if i’m living in…
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Have You Been Reborn Yet? by Adrian Ernesto Cepeda
Are you alive? I heard the poet ask, speaking to me, my ear bud as it started snowing as I walked inside the gates of Père Lachaisecemetery? Is everybody in? the ceremony is about to begin? Embracinghis American Prayeran ex-patriot in Paris has been my guide since the moment I held that 45 vinyl record when he first lit my fire, ageseven, thirty years laterafter…
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Jefferson Island, 1980 by Jack. B. Bedell
One puncture drained the whole lake into a salt dome. Then the drilling platform, boats, and trucks parked nearby along the bank. All down the same hole. The island was no longer an island without water to set its borders. Silt bottom dried slowly, stared at the sky like a blank face, until one night after…
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Anne Frank House by Judith Kingston
In which I discover many years later that I never did read my great-grandparents’ names in the book of Jews killed in concentration camps I came to put my hand on the book.I paid my entry fee and walked aroundmainly to turn to that page and lookat my name in…
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Doing Time, Part 2 by Craig Rodgers
4. A hum begins, white noise smoothing away the vestiges of an already waning dream. The hum becomes a grating vibration as somewhere nearby machinery shifts into active gear. Mower. Gray breathes in and rises from sleep. Noise swells and recedes but never ceases. Arms stretch and legs touch floor as he sits up amid…
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Inland by Lucía Orellana Damacela
Facing inland like most of the moai of Easter Island.Perhaps the Rapa Nui people thought that nothing could arrive from the sea, although that is how they arrived. Taking in the sun. Aversion to non-walkable surfaces.Markers on a fence invisible to visitors. Their shell and coral eyes dislodged like seeds from watermelons when they…
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Recall Has Become an Affliction by Kari A. Flickinger
Recall has become an affliction. The early years are like-claws in the dark waves of rotating temples.Their gait subtracts, and twists up therein not-sleep, behind a sleep-mask I am told is supposed to assist. What matters withers, like a thirty-six-hour-old death-bloom, corpse-flower, I have lost traction with the winged crowd. I expand…
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EverPoppy by Frances Boyle
Maura hauled in the barge, the singing cable slick with water threatening to freeze on her hands. There should have been robotics or at least hydraulics, but this village didn’t have working winches, not even anyone, new parent or former child, willing to stand watch on a frosty morning for…