1589 14 9
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I assemble myself daily//
from the ready-mades/
of a fast talking world,
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158921
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Clare sits bolt upright in the hard plastic chair, warily tracking every passer-by. In her lap, Kim’s hair is damp with sweat, dark blonde curls melting against her flushed cheeks. Clare absently strokes the length, soothing both of them.
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158800
|
Tonight was no remarkable night. The sun rose and set without question, children’s hearts broke with truth, around the world millions of people lost someone they cared about, millions people fell in love. It was an average day—it was unremarkable. It w
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158833
|
Karen likes to make a big deal about life experience. Specifically how much more she has than me. What that actually means, she's never made clear. The definition changes and mutates as the years go by, always in her…
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158800
|
When I finally went back to school in the fourth grade, after coming down with polio, my classmates were very welcoming, though I couldn't go outside and run around like them yet at recess or lunch time. That would come, just not right away. But it was th
|
158853
|
Wafting wisps of fondness twinkling
in time with fairy lights pointing out lawns in cities
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158864
|
The bird studies me, we lock stares, with no care for who blinks first, birds don’t do macho stand-off.
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158832
|
They could have heard a pin drop in the car for the rest of the ride to her house, where she looked at him one last time and found nothing admirable, nothing memorable about him.
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1588106
|
Post No Bills.
The Crouton Mavens.
United Burglars Union.
Crockpot Mistakes.
The Heavy Doors.
Fire In the Yurt.
Douche Baguettes.
Upsy-Daisey.
Schmazelhood.
Sidetrackia.
Flotsam and Jetsam.
Argyle Sox.
Roachmobile.
The Adulterer’
|
158863
|
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…
|
158897
|
Rory and Betty Sloan entered the first of 40 rooms in the new Motel 6 to place Holy Bibles in 40 night tables.
|
158862
|
cotton balls in your ears do not deafen you to the rocking of your mother's bed...as she and the new uncle set forth on the turbulent sea of their maiden voyage.
|
1588108
|
nothing can stop a group of genteel Southern women from a card game, and divine intervention makes one's participation in such an event quite worthwhile
|
158823
|
When it was time to leave, she lingered beside you,
bidding you to come again.
I flicked my cat, dog tail, indifferent.
She wanted to lick your cheek.
|
1588157
|
It is a sunny day in the autumn of the patriarch.
|
158854
|
THERE'D been mutterings on the shareholders' board about a dodgy deal shoved through. In the rush after the towers' thing to get out relevant stock an executive producer had signed off on some film school kid for five big ones to shoot a…
|
158700
|
"Only the gods in heaven can do such things," he shouted back, his voice hoarse and parched from no water for two days. "Wouldn't your God have saved you by now if he had the power?"
|
15871211
|
|
158796
|
It's because poetry would not do
because the fireflies were alive that night, aflame
|
15871410
|
Sid, the owner of the red convertible, always slept with his twin Lhasa Apsos, Helpless and Hopeless. He was an early riser and took his “girls”, as he called them, out for a brief walk, yes, and also he was up early to take his morning penicillin because he…
|
1587158
|
this reaching, this striving to love like it's there becoming something we need.
|
15862517
|
|
1586106
|
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.
|
158632
|
It was hard to believe that, even very recently, there had been first days of school where nothing happened.
|
15861713
|
and the mass exceeds the buoyancy/
and gravity pulls you back,
|
15861512
|
She wears three or four tattered sweaters on cool days. She pushes a basket borrowed from a grocery store. There is a plastic lawn bag in the basket with God knows what inside.
|
158661
|
ANTHONY I decide after Jill and I have dinner at her flat and smoke an enormous joint that I need to call Tyler, a conversation I'm not particularly looking forward to. I leave and she's not happy, but I tell her I have homework and we kiss a little bit…
|
15861911
|
Today the isobars are far apart.
|
158610
|
He lost his patience and began ranting and raving, angry that he had to come home every night and feel like he was being smothered by a pillow. “I can’t make it stop,” she said. “I can’t make myself stop feeling this way.”
|
1586127
|
But those burning red numbers persist in my mind
and I can't rest 'till they're gone
They always come back
Like the cat in that childhood song.
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