1105 4 3
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Before the paint spikes Coney Island to the wind, I walk home through the strum of a shield, colder than the one he left behind. For the hour I sprawl along the sidewalk in her laugh, crater's shadows for Wonder Wheel, he is midnight sun in The Last Waltz. Where the glow…
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214893
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You’re often photographed at Martha’s Vineyard at sunrise, Key West on New Year’s Day, Coney Island on Christmas, and variously at dive bars in Montauk. You’re a woman of a certain age and you are also a woman of the world. You’re a 21st century
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75731
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She read her briefs as she sat at the café table in her smart dark blue suit, and she altered the wording on the briefs in front of her, and she would check the watch at her wrist as if there were a pulse there: Am I still alive, yes. Am I still alive,
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74200
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He reaches towards the single, tall glass on the table between them and picks it up; ice cubes chatter merrily. He takes a sip and smiles.
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123233
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Amanda Palmer's explaining the eyebrow thing. An altercation with someone at Roadrunner, or maybe old boyfriend shit to burn— She's animated but he's losing signal, filling in the blanks himself. Whatever, it won't light at first, and then WHUMP and she…
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111541
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On such warm nights when wet sex happens suddenly, please, remember the amaryllis. How they’ll push up out of the ground in August after the first real heat opens the air. I too was born in such weather.
Balmy nights when heat lightning beats in the
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1141113
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106965
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Before you tripped on the third rail, you were like any other: coat a shard of midnight-blue, eyes filled with gratitude but for nothing. You were a lost coyote on a snowy hill. With sad magnificence you wandered, terrorizing passengers who secretly wished to pat your…
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153397
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I am the marigold wheel no one can understand, the menace your grandfather warned you about. Yes, yes, that last phrase was overkill...
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85900
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I try to make conversation by showing her the washing instructions for the jeans I just bought for $375.00. She reads slowly. “What, do they assume you live in Australia or something?”
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129942
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Why do men become explorers? he asked. Because they want to cannibalize the unknown; to leave the chemicals, the furniture (and, yes, the shrew) behind; to make their way hi ho into the brush, whose weeds and lianas remain empty of the exhortations of Jesus Christ, whose…
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106621
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She said it feels wrong. Too wet, she said. I snickered, she smacked.
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93312
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I sulk across the room to feed you,hold your hand, tell you everything will be fine. It is the right time of night,the light from the street falls onto the chairat the perfect angle. I look at you, gray, shimmering, persnickety. Don't move, thisis just the dust, helping me…
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44963033
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Once you start telling the truth it's hard to quit. You look around and reasons are everywhere. It's like a new appliance, truth-telling, a can opener that's so good you barely have to turn it.On the phone my sister asks me why I don't come out and see her in San…
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143896
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Every time she tries to sleep they come; legions of small armored things scuttle claws aloft across the purple sand as soon as she stops moving.
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121641
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"Now, here daddy was on the back porch at night talking with some man about leaving."
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1531411
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We met in graduate school. We were both taking a course on teaching using the case study method over at the Business School. I was from psychology. She was from biology. We were both getting Harvard doctorates. But as many people…
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193100
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The kitchen I snuck out of seventeen years before kept fading to black and white, with this layer of something between me and them.
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125500
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Bobby took one out and looked at the date. "July 1965. Does that mean anything to you, Ma? Carla, T.J.?" Bobby handed the paper to my mother. "Why don't you spread it out on the counter to see if you can find something that he might have wanted…
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1750115
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You aren’t easy to explain, you Americans.
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1574119
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Cherry was America's least favorite pie. Her mother made it every year for her father's birthday because "daddy doesn't like cake." America had to wash the bowls, the wooden spoon, the plates and finally the Pyrex dish. Her brother got to "contribute" by climbing the tree…
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103066
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The moon, a cataract cloaked in its charcoal fog, slowly seeps among the trees; night's unguent.Its glance is constant and white,its arc known. I watch its brow of bone with constant wonder.The long, slow funeral of America is taking its time; its…
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92021
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At one time it appeared that
Everyone was walking their own angel
On a leash, but
Now we're not that sure at all
And it could come out in song
That it might really be the angels
Who’ve been walking us
All along
All this broken glass
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1362106
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It’s always fun and easy/
to punish the poor
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139000
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Once upon a time a queen was blessed with twin sons, which she named Nosch and Amiaivel.
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985147
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Through the Walmart parking lot
they came...
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81220
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God love him, she used to say. you never noticed it much at the time because it is just something like a habit. a benevolent habit. around through the years and decades she went like that. God love him, she used to say, if she saw someone resting peacefully, of if…
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16501411
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She'd liked the name of the tanker. The Amoco Cadiz.
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45432
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in dark recesses of this morgue of earth / where beauty of the good does not compel, / where evil's horrors seldom do repel— / Americ gods reign o'er from birth to birth.
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63374
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As Sebald says, I grew up in the shadow of war....
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