1925 2 2
|
“Pupilo Durcál!” She yelled. “You stupid pendejo!” He limped along without another glance. Rosa suddenly realized her dreams all week were really omens.
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19252015
|
Feminine, safe, though disembodied,/
she shapes your life in ways/
your mother never could.
|
192486
|
She sees Connick Jr. now has a microphone. He is singing “All of Me” as if he meant her to take all of him.
|
192421
|
With my heart preserved, I shoved a handful of baubles back in its place: some pages torn from my favorite books, a bass guitar string, a butane lighter, a shot of vodka. I stitched myself back up and left the roof in favor of the attic, where I hung my s
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1923168
|
This latest married man who lives at a great distance has leeched her energy in that very particular way such men do. Next to him, I am as interesting as long division.
|
1923106
|
It’s always fun and easy/
to punish the poor
|
192332
|
The Bird King suffers from phantom head syndrome. Ever since his decapitation by a critic, he has felt pain where his head used to be. Sometimes it wakes him in the night. It's so excruciating, he fumbles for a saw. But alas! there's nothing to chop off.He's seen every…
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19232215
|
The river’s not/
a river but/
a FEMA map/
of flooding probabilities.
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19231614
|
In the St. Mark's Bar and Grill romance is a speedy thing, a blurred whir of grope, kiss, connect. The tricky thing is timing: to leave in time for the boozy love of the hour to carry through to full, naked contact. Some succeed of course. Others overstay, hang past the…
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192362
|
The night is a jelly slosh, a fertile rumble, a rhumba, black and seeping, thick. An arm rises.
|
192310
|
Inside my high-rise studio apartment there are only three locations where Crane Man can't see me. The bathroom is one—although he watches me go in and he watches me come out. Crane Man does a lot of watching. Sometimes it seems he spends more time looking…
|
192311
|
maybe if I bat my lashes just right, or look prim enough to fly, you just might touch me tonight, and the dream will pop and fizz and I will wake somewhere, your hands smoothing these lines of worry away.
|
192332
|
your olive-pitting thumbs
|
192333
|
People ask me sometimes what it’s like to meet your wife when you’re six years old, and I have to admit now that I don’t really understand the question. Marla and I, we were just friends for most of that time. She made me laugh. I let her crib off my math
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1922139
|
with cool confidence
and believable body language
|
192243
|
…Professor Wumbat begins.
|
192287
|
Once upon a time, before there was Prairie, there was Swamp.
Therein lived Salamander and Snake. High above them, in the tops of Cypresses lived Woodpecker.
|
1922102
|
I never pulled it off, never rode an atom through a super collider with a nose full of cocaine and a drink in my hand. Never was a bullet, zooming through the city, skin pressed to bone, nerves on fire. Never was an atom bomb, ever-exploding in slow motion, ripping off…
|
19221010
|
A block after his first crime, he found a bookstore to commit another.
|
19221911
|
|
192242
|
I had the hair of a metal god, cracking it against the air whenever the stereo belched fists.
|
1922129
|
Harpo sits and looks at something I can't see. I drink beer and ask him questions. I ask him how they found the cancer. Backache, he says. He went to see a doctor.
|
192144
|
|
1921129
|
in which creative destruction holds the heads of entire populations beneath the surface of the water in bathtubs until the bubbles stop
|
19212112
|
The decision is made. I am going to a Zumba class. What better way to achieve behavior modification than to leave my TV and fuzzy bear slippers behind for some hot Latin aerobics in a strip-mall? I try to pull my hair into a ponytail that will make the two inches of…
|
192100
|
Sometimes Seattle's the next thing to heaven. The sky's diamond blue, the sun's a caress; your whole soul can breathe. You know what the shouting's about. But the sun quickly fades to Protestant gray and the gray last a long…
|
192151
|
One year, she got a kite.
|
1921114
|
Upon learning the fetus has fingernails, Missy texts her boyfriend: It has nails! He won’t reply because he’s just left for war, but she does it just the same.
|
192000
|
A night bird lands on the windowsill with a struggling copper moth in its beak. The bird cocks its head at Rasmus, then swallows the clockwork insect in a gulp before flying away.
|
19202216
|
Maybe she would get married and have a baby, she said. Not with me, I said
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