1955 20 11
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...he thought often of the rollicking waves, of being pulled under, of being weightless and senseless...
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12722011
|
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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1703205
|
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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5882016
|
Tongs, uvulas, money. Love. But really, silence.
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3812017
|
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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19222012
|
I drove to you in April / and you loved me all through Illinois
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21752015
|
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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3666208
|
Writers, hopeful ones, hopeless ones, poets and petty penmen, worked as bartenders, librarians, substitute teachers, anything.
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17652018
|
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16512011
|
We invent our beauties//
as we find them and engineer/
our horrors
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39202014
|
The ethnographer turns on a recorder. The story began before but that is lost, like it never happened.
|
3787209
|
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…
|
16752011
|
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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18472013
|
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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1775208
|
The music, Antonín Dvořák's 'New World Symphony,' the second movement, 'Largo,' immediately alters my mood.
|
1695209
|
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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2344203
|
“This is the most dangerous road in the world and you want to drive down it. You crazy,” he said.
|
21132013
|
A tiny story, 55 words, just enough to fit on a . . .
|
26782015
|
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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15112012
|
Our ironies don’t make us happy
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17041914
|
Sure, to a teacher, life is a paper / but what would life be to a druggist?
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4981918
|
A pet scorpion.
A pet scorpion named Chris.(1)
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47561912
|
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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25001911
|
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…
|
1932198
|
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…
|
57771922
|
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.
|
14731914
|
Before she flushes the toilet the world is spinning.
|
32491912
|
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
|
1540199
|
I know this: the sky is vast here//
and the sun unforgiving/
to any architecture not the best
|
10121914
|
To whoever reads this next--Henry James makes my head hurt.
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