1806 5 4
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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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180633
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Behind the plastic kitchen, where the special children sometimes sit, a large boy in tight dungarees had grabbed Stephanie's hair in one fist.
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18061512
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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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180644
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She couldn’t help but wonder what 93 year-old Sohrabjee looked for in the torn, dusty lithograph of Marilyn in Persia one of the orderlies had stuck to the wall of the corridor outside Jasmine Wing decades ago.
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180611
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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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180671
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Scales were installed on station platforms. Those who were overweight were turned away
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180662
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If we thought that love was gone
that out of sweetness none remained
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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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180587
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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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180532
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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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180562
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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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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
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“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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180531
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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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180586
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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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18052913
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With such demeaning precarity, I can’t read/
anything more than a thousand words
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180500
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When my feet touched the ground on the tarmac at Bagram I cannot begin to describe the feeling I had. It was as if God had spoken to me directly, whispering in the cold mountain air: “Son of Marjan, I welcome you.” The feeling took hold and overcame m
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18051211
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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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180453
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She asks if I only write about men, which I tell her is redundant. I also answer, “Yes, but sometimes I write about them as race cars, hyenas, vaginas, or God.”
She smirks like she wants to smile, but it’s stuck halfway out her door. Her happiness has
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180410
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On the day they were born, the old mother eagle named her chicks Faith, Hope, and Charity.
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180452
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I imagined the sun to be the moon and discovered it was not on a road trip in California where I noticed the sun on one side and the moon on the other.
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180421
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the champagne foam cascades like cherry blossom ensnared in the first gales of spring
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18041611
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he thought of her / longingly
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180400
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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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180444
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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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180411
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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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1804127
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What purpose other than misery/
can cancer serve? And Parkinson's,/
AIDS, and STDs?
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1804129
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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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1804115
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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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