1762 15 7
|
...lotus roots carved with clunky holes like a mouse’s drawing of Swiss cheese.
|
176233
|
It is another evening of ordinary sand. The moon worms, all mellow and white, glow shine over the laminated floor. Shay's bladder is full, and protesting with a thump of ache. Shay holds on nervously.Last time she pissed tiny silver fish that roiled in the froth of her…
|
176282
|
The calculation was precise.
|
1762117
|
He got tired of the pool party, the chit-chat, the suburban posturing, and he decided to swim home.
|
176286
|
...this dim and empty room, and behind a wall of glass a flag materialized, backlit and fluttering, and I am not saying what country's flag it was, just that it was a flag, that awesome symbol of the nation state and fervid jingoism...
|
1762147
|
|
176221
|
Odd bookends
stuck in familiar territory,
we have become lethargic
|
176294
|
Oh, what jealousy does to us! What love does to the living!
|
176263
|
I had the smallest taste. Liquid heat, gifted from lips. One long moment spent lost in her warmth. Fleeting. I should have drunk more. Would she have relented to one more sip? One final taste? “Be careful,” she…
|
176186
|
You lazy fuckwit! You half-assed shithead!
|
176131
|
He sees how he could release the duck, imagines it winging low over the water to where the others have made it safely.
|
176111
|
I held at my gut and immediately regretted laughing at Frank when he pulled the pocket-knife out on me. I doubled over and fell to the floor.
"John, was a typer all this important?" Frank asked, knife in hand.
|
176100
|
I didn't care for parties when Jackie was alive and I donot like them now. Deborah, our daughter,…
|
176152
|
All is Ready I have bathed in patchouli oil and my hair gleams, lustrous with brushing. I am wearing my gold ankle bracelets with the ruby charms that my love gave me when we had been married one year. My robe is fuschia silk and under it I wear…
|
17611313
|
Let's walk through this park. We can talk until dark. You have the look of a wolf. I'm not stupid, Jack. I'm a lamb, you'll see, once you get to know me. That tat is fierce and your leathers tight black. My ink is old and black suits me, I'm told. …
|
1761118
|
8) An exercise online calls for the first sentence on page 45 of the book nearest you as a suggested description of your love life. The book 9) nearest me still is _The Quarterly_, 1, spring 1987, that I have on my desk in preparing to write an essay.
|
176100
|
She's sure the chicken is having an identity crisis; it's staring into the full-length mirror, watching itself, a never-ending exchange of eyeball glances between chicken flesh and silver-blasted…
|
17611610
|
There will always be some
who misread the dance
|
176110
|
He huddles against the wooden beam of a chop suey stand, glaring out into the giant technological organism that was his city. Lights, hulking monstrosities and endless possibilities were teeming in the night-hustle that surrounded him.
|
17612113
|
The virtuoso tortures a violin/
in homage to Paganini.
|
1760104
|
The loss of my first mentor came as a harsh blow. Roaming the forest with my dog Rosie just wasn’t the same. Her heart was in the right place, but when it came to armed combat, Rosie just didn’t have the goods.
|
17602411
|
|
176010
|
The way I felt was as though you were, every day, making the conscious and deliberate decision not to be with me, not to share your life with me—and not to share my life, that you were choosing not someone else, but something else.
|
1760138
|
the / future is now incomplete
|
1760155
|
I made myself tiny as I could, imagining I was Houdini shackled underwater, holding my nose and practicing my escape...
|
176095
|
I follow what pulls me forward.
|
1760114
|
I have an appointment set for the day after next; you said you thought you might be firing blanks and then I feel a kick into my chest—two kicks, three, seven at least—my cat is going crazy at the stinky tom outside the window and the birds are waking, sc
|
176044
|
I arrived Sunday evening to a darkened house. Everything unplugged. Even the fuses from the breaker. Meticulous, this undoing. Silence has a sound. Cold has a voice, a pearly cigarette whisper. It says, “Metaphor?”
|
176076
|
I pay for 3 Trump Troll Dolls and a package red licorice twizzlers and head back toward the door. Dancing Gnome Girl is there to greet me. I stick a twizzler in the teeth of the donation pail.
|
176041
|
"What does it say about our political process when I could pick students at random out of any of my classes who would do better than the actual candidates. That scares me. What’s happening to people? How did we get here?”
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