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I remember being sent a picture once from one of my old roommates, Louise, back in Chicago where I came from. The photo was taken when she’d come out for a visit to California. In the picture I am sitting on the front stairs of my house in the Rockridge
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176084
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I awake one morning to find that still,
the leaves continue to fall.
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176021
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I look at that wall, it has piss-stain yellow paint and water scars from several years of leaky pipes. I say I wouldn’t mind that, if he took out some of that wall.
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176011
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The closed door swallowed up both voices, and all I could make out afterward were muffled pleas and angry answers that died completely.
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175921
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Mrs. Noah eyed the thickening clouds from the front stoop. Noah was still out in the yard kicking up sand in disgust, arguing with himself the whole time. Piles of cedar timber lay strewn all about. Maybe if they’d lived even three days’ journey clos
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1759101
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Loving you, I always knew, was a job I’d only get via a dead woman’s shoes. There you were, the recipient of pot roasts, fresh bread, at a loss amongst neighbourhood widows and divorcees. A tide of them rolled over you in calico blouses, cut off jeans
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1759123
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I'm explicating Emily Dickinson when the alarm starts: three long, two short. Lockdown mode. Only there was nothing in the staff bulletin about a drill. So I tell the students to get down on the floor, away from the window. I open the classroom door and lock it from…
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1759127
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my space heater throws a pale orange light
my white candles flicker in the middle of the night
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175977
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I want to be that daring gardener who ploughs up her front yard -- to the horror of the Neighborhood Association.
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175962
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If we thought that love was gone
that out of sweetness none remained
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175800
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Track One Johnny Burkemeister, lead vocals and flutist of the band Albatross Antics, sits on his bed thinking in silence. His elbow rests on his knee, and his palm on his forehead with his fingers running through his dirty-blonde hair. He is staring at a copy of Paste…
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175874
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"Merry Christmas, Willie."
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175811
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I am in the hallway, but I don’t sense it. That is to say: I don’t feel my body. I am like a phantom, a limbless entity floating, flailing.
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1758112
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...and he would stumble from bed in a panic and fling the toothbrush at the mirror cursing all the while "fuck fuck why can't I forget her".
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175833
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Things are a little out of hand. Information fills room after room after room. I have no bloody idea where I am. I have your photo, but the navigational coordinates are difficult to interpret. Where the hell are you, anyway? I don't like mazes — too much like…
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175822
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Next to you, the mother tightens her grip on her stroller. The young teenager tears her gaze from her mobile phone for an instant.
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175833
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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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175822
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“Let’s see that great big telescope of yours,” she exhaled hotly, “I want to grind your lenses!” The doctoral candidate dutifully stood between her and his massive telescope so her hands would encounter some instrumentation with no optical components.
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175877
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How much do book editors earn? Peacock Love. (aww…)
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17582313
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I am abandoned to the mundane/
calculations of a small mind/
trapped by small considerations
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175801
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I am reaching out at you, to you from the nest. From the nest, please come to the nest, to see me and to hear my life story. From the nest I go, and then I arrive at the nest, suddenly, just in time to be…
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175810
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The Jester sat down on the edge of his mattress. He laboured to bring one gout ridden leg up to lay across the other. The jingle bell at the tip of his pointed toe mocked each serrated movement of his limb with a jaunty tinkle. He grabbed his ankle to arrest its…
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1758137
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a Ferris wheel gently rocks
its last riders
then dumps them to the ground.
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175855
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Alessandro was no ordinary demon (what demon is?), insofar as he had Constable Pulce's number. In demonly fashion he had Pulce's number in a way Pulce himself did not.
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175721
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Robbie Lange closed his laptop and leaned back in his chair. Yawning, he looked out the window into the black night. Another evening at the office, he thought. He counted the other lit windows in the skyscrapers around his building. “Goodnight, everyone
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175776
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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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175735
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I was sitting on the steps in the entryway to our apartment building taking off my running shoes when I spotted a paperclip on the floor. I assumed it had fallen from the mail that my wife had just taken from our mailbox. Once my shoes were removed, I went down to pick…
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175733
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Stop! the voice commands in a guttural shriek. Do not move. You are under arrest. But the voice is only in his head; he has created it the way a writer creates characters on a page, and it is just as real to him as if someone were really there.
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175700
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Beautiful,
a country left abandoned by the parade path.
The soldiers that typically occupy this place,
temporarily removed to neighboring lands;
congregating together,
backs to the native.
I benefit from the accidental diversion.
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17571712
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When asked to turn over the Church's riches / he brought before the Roman prefect the poor, blind, ragged and infirm.
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