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Barter Rings
before I was born I was granted a rite to ceremony, but it is not enough not when there are no more barter rings and only your ring-bearer bartering
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and it was all good things
i remember when we were fourteen and i said you couldn’t dance for shit because your laces were untied, and you tripped over them again and again, your smile a lighthouse, and i said god, i hope this lasts forever, otherwise i don’t know if there’s much to look forward to in twenty years – i remember when we crushed the heads of dandelions in between the asphalt and the blue marbles that my brother found discarded in the alley behind my house, milky dandelion stems and the smell of dogs outside of the elementary school when the sprinklers were all turned on – i remember when i was only…
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Exotic Fish
It is a starved town. Bone-white houses pave the beach like conches and oysters, although these oysters are bereft of pearls. Towards the edge of the town most distant from the beach, a thin train track etches its way through the sand to a run-down station and a dosing ticket-taker. The metal rails of the track are faded and frail, like the ribs of cattle skeletons that warn of a desert’s heat. Trains pass by the town infrequently, billowing out waves of smoke and silt which mix with the sand and vanish in minutes. Boats lie, grounded, anywhere between the beach and the station, some boarded up and full of…