1768 1 1
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My mother told me I came out of her screaming and didn’t stop for two years. After that I took up rocking.
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176853
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Now that school is back in session, we move through our days like cage fighters, tagging in and out of matches: The Battle of the Bottle, The Diaper Duel, The Pout Bout. So while I'm assembling a casserole for tomorrow, Susan feeds Margot. While she washe
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17672015
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I said, “Marcy, Source Almanac is a guide for the Apple.”
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176731
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The fabric on the waiting room chairs is stained and matted, but has been cleaned over and over.
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176764
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Outlined against the thinly layered darkness of the room, there is a silhouette of a small boy with his feet pulled up to the chin, failing to hold its own against the thousand stares from the deep violating the stillness of his room, their long familiarity with the…
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17671611
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In my upper room, a sermon/
was playing about sundry.
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1767136
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With the morning comes the repetition...
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1767116
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In the boat on the way there I knew we'd see something spectacular, and was prepared.When the glacier dropped large pieces of ice into the Arctic ocean and sent a long wave at us, I screamed and screamed.My parents had their backs to the glacier and missed everything. …
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176742
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God's honest truth, I wake up every morning when my clock punches out its dulcet, insistent clangs, a setting called Ultra Zen Up & Out. I brush my teeth with a blue dollar store toothbrush and watch one of the five morning TV shows designed to let me know the weather…
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176784
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I've been mostly positive since joining up with Sister Helen. My previous pessimism involved spiritual degeneration, moral decline and decay, weak and weary instincts. I clung to life, afraid to die. Then I read something by Nietzsche, I'm not sure where but, like a seed,…
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176700
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With her head thrown back and mouth open she howls into the dark green night, letting her gloved hands droop like the front paws of a dog. A large orange corsage attached to the bosom of her gown.
Around her thick neck, a ribbon of black velvet. Her p
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176764
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And then, and then, and then! After all that, this. After all that bullshit with her Dad, the Associate Principal, the idiotic counselor, and that psychotic police officer, after all that, this: a dead black cat. Blocking her path! Right in the middle of the street! …
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176632
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A woman walked in from the kitchen. She sat next to him as he poured what was left in the whiskey bottle into each glass. “They could’ve given us more time to make a payment,” he said.
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17663020
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We are moments away from the end, and it feels like it.
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17661211
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Bag worms hang in their cloudy white hammocks. This is the month of webs when long-bodied yellow and black spiders sign their autographs.
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176653
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Her time was spent in its usual way, breakfast, pills, organizing and cleaning. It was just hours behind today; hence the late swim. She was proud she did it, that she went outside. She swam, moved herself in the pool, chilly as it was. The pump made a wa
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1766149
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I assemble myself daily//
from the ready-mades/
of a fast talking world,
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1766116
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'love is when the body goes away.'
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1766189
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176632
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There’s no sky like that, with twisting clouds shot up into by cypress trees that are so like dark green flames, leaping out of the earth as if a dark green oily pool were on fire underground, and this was all that could escape, was its essence.
And a
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1766136
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Skim. The stone slipped across the top of the water. The sea was a battleship grey with a liver of cerulean, foaming at the lips its puckered kisses smacking on the shore.
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17661213
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My wife goes away for a few days to the little town where Hitchcock filmed The Birds.
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176511
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The world waited with bated breath as Tiffany stood in the grocery store aisle that housed the various kinds of fruit spreads for sandwiches and toast. She tapped her toe and nodded her head this way and that while she compared the qualities of two jars of…
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176500
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[CAUTION: THIS CAN CONTAINS THE CAFFEINE EQUIVALENT OF THREE CUPS OF COFFEE. PEOPLE WHO ARE ELDERLY, PREGNANT, OR SENSITIVE TO CAFFEINE SHOULD NOT CONSUME THIS BEVERAGE!]
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176574
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...something in her raw vulnerability and daring beauty drove these men wild...
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1765188
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I told him he was just paying for his sins. He gave me a look. "Why me?" he asked.
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1765117
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War came home tonight. We weep and hug, while he stares over our shoulders, like the statue we'll make of him. We pour a drink for his shaky hands, wheel him past his friends the dead, and lie to each other about other, far off places as if we knew.
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17651714
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We have always been a trashy species./
We study ourselves by examining/
garbage-- a pile of mussel shells here,
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176553
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Out in the open air, the sun's rays washing over the dead, open fields, Nick lay, his back against the wall of the train platform, eyes facing the sky, hands outstretched to the…
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176421
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Xao Ping reflexively dug her claws into the plush chenille of the sofa and let out a low yowl. She knew the old lady would be mad if she tore the fabric, but she couldn’t help it.
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