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**PRINT: FRIENDS FROM CINCINNATI: Installment 24 features this part coming-of-age short by Chicago's Patrick Somerville, author of the Trouble collection of shorts out in 2006. | PAST BROADSHEETS |

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CENTRAL WYOMING'S PREMIERE MINOR POETESS
---
Tom Bradley

This woman's numbers were dredged raw from so deep in her very abdomen that they could only be written in her menses, by means of a genuine horse-hair calligraphy brush which she'd learned to hold just like a real Oriental. Many of her fellow soul-hemophiliacs found it deeply affecting, this literal self-expression. So she kept that calligraphy brush as a badge of her vocation, poking from the right breast pocket of her woolen plaid logger's shirt, business end bristling out to flick and splatter against you if you ever got close enough by accident. It usually seemed rinsed off well enough. You could tell because it was composed of low-pigmentation fibers borrowed from a local palomino filly's rear end.

Billing herself as the Menstrual Minstrel, she exuded that earnest inarticulateness requisite for masculine creatures in these Far Western parts. Laconism is all we have to offer, our regional identity, if you will. How many subordinate clauses have you heard from the Marlboro Man lately? Unlike the toughness, the Rocky Mountain inability to employ language was unfeigned in her case, paradoxically enough for a poetess.

Of course, the Menstrual Minstrel had already applied for her first National Endowment for the Arts grant, and it looked about to go through. This high success, and the physically felt profundity of her verse, couldn't have contrasted more piquantly with her personal mannerisms, which were those of a nice little boy trying to compensate for shyness and meager genitalia with poorly feigned toughness.

An example of her work:
I cling to my gal
Like shit to a blanket.
When she proffers up her prong,
I briskly wank it.

Another example:
No sperm whale
Can possess me.
Not ever.
Forget it, you prick.

One more:
You got beered up
and hate-crimed
My little gay brother
On that barb wire fence
On the lower forty.
You prick.


AN EMBITTERED AND AWFULLY UNATTRACTIVE OLD MAN ADVISES HIS YOUNG RELATIVE ON PUTTING THE MISSUS TO WORK


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