1632 2 1
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Papa said he'd be in the stands watching: section H, 5th row, seat 35. During warmups, she had looked, during stretches, she had looked, but she had stopped looking right before the race."Don't worry about me," he had said. "Focus on the race," so when the man had said on…
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163188
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and I can't help it if it is. I know it won't stay that way for long, but for now that's all I've got to work with, shining in my window, made of all eight fingers and a couple of thumbs. But the latest pushy words still want to give…
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163176
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He hasn't had a wedding ring in years. When George's knuckles began to swell — a little arthritis — his ring dug into his finger so bad his wife Loren took him to the ER and had it cut off. The ring, not the finger. He never knew there was a tool to cut rings,…
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1631106
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In the small hours, when the crackling of the embers had stopped and the room had gone cold, the boiler kicked in and the pipes began to clang. He was half-roused out of his sleep, and then slipped under again to dream of Marley's fettered ghost.
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163100
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Astrid hadn't always hated him.
They met at the Beta house in the fall of his junior year. Typical Friday night. Stoned, drinking beer. He and Red Chapman sitting in their room playing guitars. The girls in their blues jeans. The guys from the house hi
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1631139
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163100
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"Dude!" James smacked Peter's head. "Don't be a jerk. Did you get a look at her or not?"
Peter said, "I didn't really see her face. Is she hot? Do you wanna kiss her face?"
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163100
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There was a whole group of us Young Turk poets who hung out at the Savoy Tivoli in North Beach. Most of them drove cabs, (whereas I was now working in a damned gas station for Angel, my publisher’s man, who got me a job there.) They would double-park thei
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163142
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{A} So I think maybe I am a robot. If I was a robot, I would do lewd things, metallic (cold, hard, shiny, heavy, malleable, loud, acrid, industrial, immovable, unstoppable) things. I would do the things I do in my dark powerless dreams. People would understand and…
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1631157
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It is a sunny day in the autumn of the patriarch.
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163164
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He had stared at the back of his neck for so long that images of his nape flashed into view randomly throughout the day like interfering signals from a station just out of reach, DESIRE CHANNEL, or something, reminding him of his skewed priorities, his fa
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163111
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Seventeen-year cicadas are the sometimes-singers that surprise spring with the ugliest mouths of all.
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16311513
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We lived on the edge of a tiny Iowa town, and picked corn fields were steps away.
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1631138
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When you bring information, it does not arrive.
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163100
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Gone Heather,
with her hands in her hair,
silent for help,
over-involved now scared.
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16312011
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We invent our beauties//
as we find them and engineer/
our horrors
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16312713
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It’s beautiful to look at and to hold/
though true musicians would be appalled/
by the black plastic
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163011
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He thought the scarab was bad luck. I knew too little about omens to argue.
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1630137
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Here’s how you do it. First you get a ladder, a long one.
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163000
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The money stank on the table. Money is dirty she said, one of the dirtiest things. So many people touch it. This pile of brine would not explain its reek, only demanded that we accepted its stench as requisite. It had to have been the cash that stank, prior to its arrival…
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163010
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I'm completely naked in an unheated basement, about 40 first year university students, most of them female, are staring at my ridiculous waif-like body.
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163010
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He searched for something deserving of the word “bestowed,” something so rare as to horrify the clerics of ordinariness.
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163033
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I know I’m slipping
into my mother’s skin. I answer the phone
with her voice; her hands grind the coffee beans.
And who is this listening to NPR in the morning
while the fresh-faced girls in the neighborhood trudge toward school,,
peonies han
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1630108
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Nothing good comes from being lowered into a well to take a photograph, boy
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163054
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Beneath the crosshatch gazes of the satellites and above the maze of sound, seahorse clouds exhale a glaucoma haze before they are absorbed into surveillance footage
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163055
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And besides, since winter is coming, the dying clammy ground cherry makes a good Pilgrim hat for the fieldmouse. We found one the day after you left, at moonset, in the garage, building a nest with toilet paper in the air filter of the car.
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163086
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“No,” he says. A simple lie. “I -” He pushes the sleeping bag off of his legs. Their getaway reset was a mistake.
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163054
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Their love was doomed at the onset, yet they engaged in it anyway, heedless of the numerous error messages and critical runtime failures. Abort, Retry, Fail? They selected Retry over and over.
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163063
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You took up residence on the dark side of things, a bolthole in a wind-flayed right angle of a tower block where pigeons and suicides tumbled blackly on the air currents. You set about drifting off from who you were on a tide of cheap whisky and bad poetry, graduating…
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163055
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After shooing away the filthy pigeons and closely inspecting the bench, he squinted with his good eye at a second-page article on noise abatement headphones.
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