1789 11 9
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He asked me to bury him in Vegas.
Instead, I had him cremated in Trenton.
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1789 7 8
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of any cautionary tale is somewhere found rolling around in your own sweet voice for me. Your sound's still listing there inside my wobbly head. My head is too often in my open hands, grinning behind its face-mask like a parade on…
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1788 6 2
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1788 8 8
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I can confirm nothing/
but impressions of the world//
that appear beyond my/
body’s reach.
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1788 5 2
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1788 2 1
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Oh no, here is that Whitman man
I’ve heard he is a bounder.
Don’t look his way or catch his eye-
Just get another round, dear.
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1788 4 2
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While I was still new at Black & Twigg, shortly before Thanksgiving, Percy brought me a handwritten memo to type, the subject “Turkey Hunt,” addressed to all Black & Twigg employees in the San Francisco office from management. It said that the firm…
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1788 8 4
|
Bare feet on hardwood floor
Twists into circles
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1788 10 10
|
Yellow Pages season is on us now, and Jimmy's drivin' a contract route. He'll head out to the San Joaquin where they print, and load ‘em in the back of his Tundra with the high side walls until the whole damned rig sags low,
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1788 2 0
|
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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1788 2 1
|
The air has its dark confessional, and I have mine. Hot is called raw by some, hate mixed with malice for others. I am only separated by this dark window of time from you, but you never feared the lovely or the lonely.
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1788 14 7
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where is the magic at?
the spit
the dirt
or the words?
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1788 6 4
|
When I was 17, they said in an e-mail that you would get too drunk to function and that you would abuse them, verbally, and do way more than embarrass them in public. They said you'd yell at them and hit their mom for any reason. They put a restraining order on you.…
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1788 3 2
|
There's still a swatch of jelly on his lower lip. Did you notice? That's not the way it's done, even on the tractor.
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1788 5 3
|
The Sports Illustrated Swimsuit issue just came out, and all over America librarians are flipping through its pages and rolling their eyes. The swimsuit issue, which isn't actually about swimwear at all, but, is, instead, about young, beautifully shaped female…
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1788 15 14
|
I bear the wrong gin. Your air conditioner runs cold. It is either frigid or off, the gauge broken. You are not too old to overlook these things. You can't be choosy, but you will never beg. Just an occasional choice as you settle into this…
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1788 5 5
|
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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1787 8 4
|
SPOT ON OUR LUNG We sense A stillborn dawn. A furtive, lurking gray, A sleight of dusk, eclipse, that follows Us. TITANIC'S LANTERNS Upon My rain-glazed panes Wet lights from neighbors glow Like lantern beams from shipwrecks…
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1787 3 3
|
Waking in the middle of the night, tangled in the hotel sheets, I wanted to hear the story again: their pilot friend, the war, his specialty. "It's just a screw, son," Dad said, "nothing exotic."
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1787 6 5
|
The bar sounds grew (as bar sounds will) until everything rushed together -- clinking glass, tinkling ice, laughter and zippers going down then up.
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1787 12 3
|
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…
|
1787 3 3
|
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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1787 12 9
|
His knife enters the Maui onion. He minces garlic and applies heat to pan and melts sweet cream butter and browns the garlic first and then he adds the onion and more heat, but it's time that will surely caramelize them. Salt and pepper and splashes of wine for the pan and…
|
1787 11 9
|
"Jesus was a zombie?" I ask, shocked.
|
1787 8 7
|
We want our lives even-cut, …
|
1787 16 10
|
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1787 2 1
|
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.
|
1787 3 3
|
Susan was twenty-four when it happened again, but she had neither the patience nor the attachment to see it through.
|
1787 10 7
|
She can never say why, but guilt rides her bones
like the spirit. She rubs worry raw.
|
1787 1 2
|
It wasn’t funny. It wasn’t scary. It wasn’t great. And it never is with people.
Except..eventually..when you meet the right person..it is.
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