1895 5 4
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Max is the color of burnt caramelized sugar
the sweet crust that decorates our bright enameled pots.
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189520
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Her mother told her once: "Don't be no whore, Fe-fe."
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189565
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Looking over the crowd in the arcade is like looking over a crowd of zombies.
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1894117
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My dad at the wheel, my mother's ulcer inflamed, she puked her way across northern Alabama that summer, from Huntsville and the rusting rockets to Tuscumbia, the farthest any of us had been west. We drove through raw, blistered towns,…
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18941918
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We were in the car more than anywhere else. A few days driving, then a few days to get back home.
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1893148
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It's not loneliness I'm afraid of. It's how I would be happy to be alone too much.
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189342
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He could smell the vestiges of alcohol on his folks. They’d let him stay up till midnight to mark the new year, and his mother had sneaked him a taste of her whisky. He remembered now what she’d last said before sending him off to bed, how strange it soun
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18931817
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One day my wife got so mad at me she raked her fingernails down my face.
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1893148
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The rain is no terrible epitaph
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189352
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All wolves, my child, want to be eaten.
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189363
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The Operations Management Guru was visiting the twenty-fourth floor on Tuesday, and everyone at the company was wicked with fear.
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18922013
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She offers the girl a seat, asks her to stay for a minute, but she can’t, she just came by to say hello, and don’t you like my new raincoat?
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18921312
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They confess love for Karaoke and metal rock. They have purchased expensive Stratocasters and Zildjians.
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1892128
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In the office supply store on Union, Jeremy, the stock boy, shelves tubs of rubber bands. Tubs with an easy-access pop-top and a see-through container. If Hendy saw these tubs, she would think these particular rubber bands resembled anorexic gummy-worms,
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189241
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My father is remarkably clever. That is, for a rundown, henpecked fisherman. He has caught me again. He has me slung over his back in a rickety lobster trap and I can hear him huffing and the water in him sloshing and though I can't see his face, I imagine it is ruddied…
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18922319
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Alice writes three different versions of the letter. The last one is the most tempered, the most like her, but still it is such an unlike-her thing to do. The couple who lives above her has been disrupting her sleep nearly every night for the past three weeks. The woman's…
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189273
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It was only later, much later, that we would discover that the war we were fighting was a war between ourselves. Melissa and I left the machine, with Carlton lost forever inside. We abandoned the warehouse. Our backs were scalded from the heat, and the hole in the…
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18922916
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a world of probability against plague
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18912915
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In a rousing show of support for guns and the owners who love them, the Legislature passed and Governor Greg Abbott gleefully signed a law proclaiming April 15 as Take Your Gun to Work Day in Texas.
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18912011
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...you lick you ice cream, little pink tongue like a cat's, flick, flick... lick fast, girl, the heat's gonna melt it...
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189121
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I used to think the world was fucked and it was up to me and me alone to see it unfucked. That's really what I used to think, but I've been trying to work on that. It's not a particularly flattering characteristic I have. I'm trying to be more positive.
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189151
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Class (appears in my book Breaking it Down; no journal publication) When your neighbor James Frehley cusses you out for hanging a block and tackle from the silver maple in your front lawn, begin to pull the engine from your Galaxie anyway, smile and nod…
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1891108
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Wake up, stretch. Check the curtained windows for sunlight or
that dreaded grey frame that forces the covers to come back up
and the alarm clock to be set to ‘Snooze’.
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189142
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We've worked silence over /
Like pros, our best work together.
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18911711
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When he woke he carried the body of a cat instead of a man. Next to him his cat dreamed it had a human body.
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189198
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Letter(s)The sky set itself on fire, butit really didn't make a whole lot of difference. Birdsknew not to worry any more thanusual. Trees thought and made the mostof their landscapes as a way ofbeing modern and yet timeless. It's onlypeople who suffer from too much…
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18911613
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If this was the day when the bribes of whiskey and US dollars would fail to work. If on this day a black bag, smelling of shit and fear, would be pulled over his head – the bloodied roots of a knocked out tooth tickling his neck.
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18903013
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I had felt suddenly lighter and next thing I knew I was watching Leonard Tucker and Sister William from somewhere near the ceiling. I saw myself, too, at my desk, holding my songbook out in front of me like everyone else.
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18901312
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He introduced me to key lime pie, and for this alone I would have loved him forever. It was an innocent time for me, and I was easy to please.
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18903616
|
A forgotten sprinkler is going in a neglected flower garden, water overflowing the bent wood borders and flooding the ground on either side.
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