1366 20 11
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There was a form to it, not reproduction. I wanted to write Moby Dick without a man in it. [I wanted to write Moby Dick with only a woman in it.] But I didn't do it. It's like a seven-year diary, and it did happen. I might write it as memory then.
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1821 20 5
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He tells me that only a few things had happened in his life but some of them he had felt deeply.
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684 20 16
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Tongs, uvulas, money. Love. But really, silence.
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500 20 17
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Betty shakes herself out of her reverie and sprinkles a bit more salt on Frank's meatloaf. Over the last few weeks, usually when she's in the kitchen, her mind wanders to Florida. Betty loves Florida, loves the retirement community where her sister Esther lives.She pours…
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2056 20 12
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I drove to you in April / and you loved me all through Illinois
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2328 20 15
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The tailfins of our ’57 Plymouth Fury dip and rock from the stress: Three boys—say no more?—jumping into the car. And Dad, loading suitcases into the trunk, working them around the steel cooler heavy with Cokes, root beers, ice. He slams the trunk lid dow
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3808 20 8
|
Writers, hopeful ones, hopeless ones, poets and petty penmen, worked as bartenders, librarians, substitute teachers, anything.
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1880 20 18
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1734 20 11
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We invent our beauties//
as we find them and engineer/
our horrors
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4089 20 14
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The ethnographer turns on a recorder. The story began before but that is lost, like it never happened.
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3924 20 9
|
My son thinks he's French.His accent was cute at first, but it's starting to get on my nerves. If he asks for another glass of Beaujolais I'm gonna go to jail for child abuse.Yesterday, I walked upstairs to make him turn his new Jacques Brel album down and I swear it…
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1805 20 11
|
When the car arrived, Kitty bounded out, lipstick-stained cigarette dangling, silver hair tightly teased. We could not escape her hug, smelling of peppermint and Aqua-Net and Jean Nate.
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1971 20 13
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I sprinkle seaweed over the water and all twelve rise to feed. Two of them went down the hole but knew to come up. A toilet has mouths and caverns, not a bad place at all for fish.
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1875 20 8
|
The music, Antonín Dvořák's 'New World Symphony,' the second movement, 'Largo,' immediately alters my mood.
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1798 20 9
|
Leaves dance their way down,unfazed by this September heat. Bus stop routines set already-summer ended years ago.A chipmunk scampers undera parked truck while once againthe young man does his morning…
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2470 20 3
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“This is the most dangerous road in the world and you want to drive down it. You crazy,” he said.
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2255 20 13
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A tiny story, 55 words, just enough to fit on a . . .
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2870 20 15
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I tell my friend, the animal lover, not to get too near the panther's cage. "Why not?" she asks. "You'll see," I say.
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1629 20 12
|
Our ironies don’t make us happy
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1819 19 14
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Sure, to a teacher, life is a paper / but what would life be to a druggist?
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584 19 18
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A pet scorpion.
A pet scorpion named Chris.(1)
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4904 19 12
|
It was a sore molar that was giving me trouble, on the bottom right. The dentist, about whose adulterous affairs everybody in the neighborhood knew and whispered about, ts-ts-ts'ed me and murmured "decay" before pulling out the drill.
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2626 19 11
|
My handwriting, slow in coming over many years, is good for lists, but I don't want to read sentences or write in it. Amber is on a list I wrote of things I want to remember of Russia: Rasputin's death and Peter the Great (6'7”). One of my lists I read as a poem in…
|
2038 19 8
|
You would think when a bowl hits a tree the sound would be fierce, a loud clatter as stoneware explodes on birch bark dispersing shards in daffodils and grape muscari, but the noise is gentle, a thudding clink like empty bourbon bottles rattling hollow in…
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5990 19 22
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I didn’t hear that Duncan Pratt had been killed until I’d been out of the Army for two weeks and had gone four days without a single thought about that final year in Vietnam.
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1595 19 14
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Before she flushes the toilet the world is spinning.
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3387 19 12
|
Ricky imagines bending her over his conga, yanking that bushy dark ponytail like reins and ripping into her. He sits, watches, legs crossed, smoking a cigarette. He needs a dancer for the Jezebel number now that Connie is showing. This girl would make a f
|
1648 19 9
|
I know this: the sky is vast here//
and the sun unforgiving/
to any architecture not the best
|
1108 19 14
|
To whoever reads this next--Henry James makes my head hurt.
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2714 19 12
|
I went out through another cold still morning erasing my steps behind me not because I did not want to be followed but because I did not want to find my way back again.
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