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  • Kim Addonizio (bio)

He says, Here’s what men really want: blow job, then fucking, girl on top—or next best, fucking her face down. He says, A fifty-caliber machine gun will take down an aircraft, will damage a tank. Now there’s a rifle with a ten-shot magazine, shoulder-fired, for sniping long-distance. My girlfriend quit night-managing the Quik Stop because of all the stress and is looking for something part-time. She’ll sneak off to the store and slam down two tall beers so when we go to a party, she can pretend not to be drinking. I put her picture on Dreammates.com and pretended to be her, for a gag. Sometimes late at night I write back to the sad fucks who respond to her profile. I hardly sleep anymore and I still have bad dreams. Being able to sit for hours without moving is what made me a good cop, when I was a cop. My new friend Ray is a cop and lets me ride along once in a while, those are the happiest times I have anymore. When Ray was a sniper in Afghanistan, a pregnant woman got off the bus near the embassy one day and starting spraying with an ak-47, he got a two-for-one. The kid would have just grown up one day and shot everyone. That’s how he looked at it. Do you understand what I’m saying? In Vietnam, a kid came running up with a grenade in his hand, you shot that little body and blew it apart. My girlfriend has orgasms that could peel wall-paper. That’s something, anyway, he says. [End Page 156]

Kim Addonizio

Kim Addonizio’s latest books are Ordinary Genius: A Guide for the Poet Within and Lucifer at the Starlite, both from W. W. Norton. She has authored several other books, including two novels, Little Beauties and My Dreams Out in the Streets.

“My formative years as a person and therefore writer: boys going to and coming back from Vietnam, antiwar protests in dc, JFK shot by Oswald and who else, Nixon and Kissinger lying, burning flags and bras, drinking Ripple and Boone’s Farm, smoking pot and dropping acid, reading Hesse and Mailer and Nin and Baba Ram Dass. Hope I die before I get old.”

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