Category: Teenager
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On counting cairns
Tomorrow my son moves back in bringing inexhaustible items in large clear sacks that swallow the floor like jellyfish claiming the soft sand along surf. My younger son’s things, and his girlfriend’s, are piled up in the corner. Constant piling, constant shuffling, constant marking the month, then the term, with a new pile, papers to…
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Effigy Mound
In my belly, now flat, curled a spine with indistinct tissue wrapped around its tiny bones like those of a bird. I imagine them now bleached by the sun and gathered by the wind into some sheltered corner like pickup stix. In that corner, sand, brittle leaves, acorns layer alongside, under, above and make another…
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Even so
Even as you sit smoking weed in the room I just cleaned and leave your papers and dirty dishes on the desk, not making the bed I just resheeted, there is no amount of missing you that is enough. It goes on and on like the Mississippi flows in constant cycles from mountain top through…
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How to live in a dorm
Label everything. Your scent will not do. Your good grades will not do. Use only indelible ink. Label it with your name and a time stamp saying when you will be back and expect it to be there waiting. This goes for shoes, of course, as well as books, desks, kitchen supplies, shampoo, underwear, beds,…
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Jeanie
Skies hang today like my gray-brown bed sheet from when I knew you, discolored by countless nights of filthy feet and scraped knees from spud and ding dong ditch and ghosts in the graveyard, never washing white. How long it takes to see the nonwhite on the sheet and then longer still to decide whether…
Poems from in between 