Category: Entertainment
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The Turtle
Too often I find myself Roaming the aisles Of my local pet store. I watch the turtles In their ten-gallon universe, Swimming and basking. But today, The yellow shells and red eyes Spoke to me. “Why do you come to see us?” The turtles asked. “We know you won’t take us home. You just take…
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Tiger Caves and Temple Monkeys
Previously published in The Best Asian Short Stories (2021), Kitaab, Singapore. The hills are dipped in pastel shades of gold and indigo. The wind surrounds me in playful whistles, beating my clothes in sudden outbursts and drying off the sweat on my neck. Joint-aches had troubled me a bit when I climbed up this rock,…
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never sit with your back to a bookcase
i want to say something good like blood into a basin of stars but i’ve stopped listening to myself at least i think i have i am rolling metaphors over & over & something like a simile across the desk i tie imagery into individual burlap sacks about to them drop into a well when…
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Neruda at a frat party
you ask where the restroom is & i start to weep steam coming from my shadow as you walk away has light always stumbled pursed & curled like a pork rind when you walk into a room? will my teeth crumble like peppercorns if our eyes scissor or i try to speak? i forgive you–you…
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the peak of my literary career
as a boy i collected similes or things like them sorted roadside trash by first consonant put couplets of poetry on my bike spokes like playing cards no one understood or knew where i was going but i was on the local news once on my bike jumping 15 trash cans for national poetry month
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All Ireland.
sky turning dark with sports all gone over; the football and hurling put away for a year, a final show of the end of summer and decline to slow october. all of us decked for the matches, singing the songs and very drunk, all blue like tiny flowers celebrating oncoming frost.
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African cattle.
driving toward home and late after work; shunting over motorways like logs upon a river and we plunge forward, up against pilings of light. ahead, hills shine with breaklights like campfires or fake gold necklaces fallen from an overstuffed box. night falls; it falls before closing and everyone around goes forward past office hours. african…
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Nickel, Unformed
A blue square, a house to live in against a yellow smear of sun how ugly it all seems to me now this safety, the facade of big hands tongues thickly budded with cysts full of lost ambition, a frozen lens of reason, bulky and transparent in their loving if unmerciful gods. No, I will…
