1808 8 6
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As he brushes his shoulders against other people's shoulders until he almost has no shoulders –
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180898
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. . . catching her breath somewhere between ecstasy and surprise. . .
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180754
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The Lake I. When the weather was nice, the fisherman and his girl spread a blanket over the shore's rough sand and watched the cargo ships cleave their way to the…
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180762
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he told me to be careful,my feet may bleedI watched him walk up and down the path,occasionally bendingwhy?carpenter nails, pieces of broken shinglesall along the pathnow I know why
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18071512
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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.
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180700
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Lean closer, she smiles, smell my perfume let yourself be taken to a wild forest where owls grow and trees fly.
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180786
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We were just as bourgeois as Bloomingdale’s, one generation past canned ravioli dinners with cheap white bread.
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180711
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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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180743
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I take the plastic off of the last videotape and stick it in the VCR. I make sure the channel is on 6. Still a commercial. I get my notebook, turn it to the next page and write today's date on top. I get ready. I don't really like the back and forth banter the other news…
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180741
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What about the goons? Those criminals thwarted and left for dead in every action movie for the past thirty years. I'm sure at least a dozen survived the slaughters. I'm sure at least one or two came out if it reformed. This one who quit working for Columbian drug smugglers…
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180771
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Scales were installed on station platforms. Those who were overweight were turned away
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180787
|
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180610
|
On the day they were born, the old mother eagle named her chicks Faith, Hope, and Charity.
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180687
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I do so want to bring you into the sacred linguistically eternal loop of all ordinary things on earth, but it can so easily turn into a very sudden unsparing trapdoor, or a hissing angry knot tying up itself into even more tricky sorts …
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180632
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It was hard to believe that, even very recently, there had been first days of school where nothing happened.
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180611
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I’d made it to the motel parking lot when I heard the footsteps. A sombrero may make me look good, but it does shit for my hearing, so the bastards were able to scoop me up real quick. The first one gave me a hard slap on the top of the head with an opene
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180675
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—You must be joking, he laughed.
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18062913
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With such demeaning precarity, I can’t read/
anything more than a thousand words
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180662
|
If we thought that love was gone
that out of sweetness none remained
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18061211
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When I no longer know you, what signal will you give to remind me that you and I once loved?
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180540
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We were pushing ninety down the highway through a stretch of what rightfully should have been called the Badlands. We were both absorbed and coping with the rapidly escalating stages of desperation and so neither of us noticed when the yellow figure stepped…
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180571
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She doesn’t answer. Ten minutes slide by unmolested in the anesthesia of cheap wine and resignation, the bouncers blurring and unblurring, the room dimming, quieting, the kaleidoscope of sundown giving way to the gentle sadness of candlelight.
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180522
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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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180587
|
“Susan,” he says menacingly, as if he’s a husband who’s caught a cheating wife in a discreet liaison with another man. “I thought I made myself clear about this sort of thing.”
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180511
|
No way to know why she's here, but scars and scabs can hold more information than a file or chart.
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180544
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At any moment, she'll come outside to pick up the day’s newspaper. He can see it resting beneath the blooming crape myrtle, its plastic wrapper glistening with dew.
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180531
|
Hipster-neutral dressed simulacra-person offers a glance and a wave, sudden as a ping-pong serve, designed to crowd your space and "pal" you but I dodge it — I'm practiced at this.
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180511
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My best friend died yesterday. His name was Franklin Seever, but we all called him Lin. It started when we were in Little League. There were two Franklins on the team so Coach, who was my dad, called the fat one Frank and my best friend Lin.
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1805129
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All young and loud and big and I swear her face like a lighthouse lamp, glowing—I remember thinking, ‘She’s drunk at nine in the morning.’
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1805115
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The Americans don't want us. They want knowledge. They want to eat with us. They want technology and weapons. They want the results of research they themselves are too craven to perform, answers to questions they ask themselves in whispers, in the dark. T
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