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And then she was gone

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Given the nature of the events that were to follow I'm pretty sure that no one sane could have been equipped to comprehend, much less deal with, the coming weirdness any better than I was.

Straight Out of the Can

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My other brother, Mike, has been camping out with the Carter boys down the street. For breakfast, he had beans, straight out of a can, and they were the best thing he ever ate. “These are the best,” he told them. “The best beans?” Joe, t

Stella

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It was never this warm down where I was born from an excess arm. Or maybe I was wanted. As an arm, I mean. I could have been shed defensively, though I don't know who would eat anything as spiny as my species. Of course I don't know what would eat me; I have not been…

"Leda and the Crane-Daddy" by Bobbie Ann Mason and Meg Pokrass

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Co-written with Bobbie Ann Mason

Inaccrochable

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The man is wiry and jumpy. There is a tattoo on his upper arm of Charles Manson. He jumps and jumps. He looks like a man on a pogo stick. He will not stop jumping.

Mama

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So, I rough her up with sand paper, and hit her with chains, making dents. She examines her surfaces, tidily and efficiently, indicating the spots most in need of filling in with scratches and scrapes.

Rev. Jasper Pickery and Three Manifestations of the Devil

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I shall simply give you an account of the Devil's own attempts to thwart my godly work and the three forms in which he came unto me.

Cognitive Therapy in Russian

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We aren't designed for darkness. Something deep inside of us, something much older and deeper than us is telling us to move away, get to warm, because if we don’t, come winter we will die.

The Greatest Public Works Program

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Hope wakes starving/ in the storm,/ to off and hunt.

The Locker Room

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"Buzz off," Jeff said. "You don't even know what a lesbian is."

Sounds from the Sun

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It was a lovely day all the horrors in deep hiding leaving me, leaving all of us, a chance to wonder why

Chores

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... honestly, the dishes were just tired. Too few in number and washed too often, they dreamed of an escape -- any escape, really -- from the endless cycle of hot water and being racked together to dry ...

THE TICK IS FULL

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Mark looked at the barrel. Will had filled it to within inches of the top, and that meant the water was cold enough to take away breath, cold enough to make lips turn blue. Even if it had sat all day in the sun, the bottom would be cold, but now, after

The Home

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They take her cookies they take her Coke they take her Kleenex the whole box not the used ones They take, they steal everything They’d take the brain out of an ox if they could Diamonds they steal bars of soap as long as they

Hot Lava Carpets

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"The carpet's hot lava," my son cries, pointing at the ground from the sofa."Yeowch!" I say, leaping next to him.We sit together for a moment, silently contemplating our predicament."We need to get downstairs," I tell him. He nods, but does not move. He stares at the hot…

Slices

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It was one of the first things she did after they opened the wall. That’s at least what she told me years later, more than 1000 miles from Berlin.

Cahiers du Cinéma

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Hours later, we fell out of a helicopter like hunchbacked wingless birds.

It Is Enough

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I don't know what my mother is thinking. She's either cart wheeling into crazy land or turning into a ghoul.

Diary of a Lost Girl

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They were all in love with tortured musicians, 22-year-old geniuses who hanged themselves after making one perfect album. The musicians generally lived in England. It was safer that way.

Understand, Rubberband?

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After we moved uptown we lived close enough to the park that we could go there on our own (with permission) on weekends and during school breaks to visit the zoo or the pond where people floated their mechanical boats....

The Golden Moment

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I wait for the small gap of time where the note vibratos into nothingness...

Migraine Dreams

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I walked the desert of the sun. Light was the sage, the Joshua, and the wild grass.

Diversion

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A landscape has the tendency to take on new dimensions when night comes.

Entangled

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Papa says an adding machine tape has gotten tangled up around his legs. He pulls it off his leg, but it's really his catheter tube, so he wets the bed. I tell him he's not in a tree, and I clean it up. He tells me all about it for an hour, and I to bed.…

A Forest

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Her mind was full of fresh air and swung like a bee over clover.

Family Emergency

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The phone screamed again, nearly rattling off the hook, and I winced. Only in the dead of night, silence all around it and with the ring so unexpected, did it register as an alarm like this.

Knowing

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She was a big woman, a massive, misshapen tree of a woman, wrapped in a rain-coat the size of a tent. She wore a cap on her head, its beak peeking out, drops of rain slipping of its edge like so many pieces of transparent candy.

our lips are barely touching

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Our lips can touch, just touch. Our lips can touch, but they can't really touch.

Gorgeous World

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I’ve forgiven my mother; she didn’t know what she was doing. She heard voices, had visions. She imagined herself to be a prophet named Helen when her real name was Marge. When she learned she was pregnant with me she scored some Thalidomide from my gr

Pieces of Lou, pt. 2

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Serbs and Croats? Hutus and Tutsis? The east coast/west coast thing in hip hop? Lou Lou and more Lou.