1676 16 12
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A little poem about prison
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167641
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The little girl spooned strawberry yogurt into her mouth as a pleasant morning breeze swept across the balcony of the hotel. The girl lifted the cup and stuck her tongue inside to lick the yogurt off the edges. Across the small round table, the girl's mother sat…
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167620
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No matter how you do it, forgetting something doesn’t mean as much once you’ve forgotten.
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167654
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Everyone hoped to be assigned somewhere they could just drop in on their way home for Memorial Day weekend. Someone said, Blake, you’re single. You hate your family, don’t you?
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1676116
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Even in the fading light, it looked big enough to disembowel a man.
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167665
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When I got to Pete's house he was sitting on the curb smoking a cigarette, bruised and dirty, with a smoking pile of rubble behind him where his house used to be. I hadn't heard yet, but his ol' girl left him and blew up the house when she left.
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167664
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I blame the fucking mosquito net.
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167600
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Locked at the highest rung
Unable to budge at all
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167692
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Public Wi-Fi ”hotspots” allow men and women to ogle each other discreetly while pretending to write the Great American Novel.
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167663
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It started like this: just him saying, "Nice to meet you, Marie," and me, while I just said his own name back to him, at the same time thinking, "I want you to take me to a hotel room someday, Frederick. I think I’ll like the way you’d make me feel...
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167656
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It's tough when muscle gets in the way of memory. The way pain is the only thing I can remember about certain things. Fifth grade, that's what I think of. I think of pain. Not just abstract pain, not some we'll get to it later adolescent angst or ennui.…
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1675811
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Betty, batty from hormones, in a fanciful fit, named her daughter Lavender. Husband Don winced. Brothers Donald, John, Billy, and Tom were puzzled and pleased by this sister, this girl, who was a little bit like them, yet not like them at all. …
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167596
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16751310
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Sin by Nonnie Augustine After my mother died, I met Aunt Shirley. I found her in dozens of snapshots piled in falling apart cardboard boxes we hauled down from the attic. Small girls, with huge bows bobby-pinned right on top of…
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167500
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After seventeen years of struggling to wake up early in the morning, I had managed to wake up on my own. Actually, I think it was because I was unable to sleep that I was up so early. I had laid on the bed all night, staring at the dark ceiling, taking in every…
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167565
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LECTURES A Bra Burning When Freud painted “Envy,” the women collapsed, holding fans to their faces. Hot that year, they retired to the Tyrols. 50 Days of Palindromes Although Thiebaud painted cakes like women,…
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167510
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“Now I see clearly my whole life is pointed in one direction — there never has been any choice for me (Travis Bickle, "Taxi Driver").
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167500
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Blast! crashed through
Shelter of car
Violence! of blow!
On window glass
It winced! on
Four wheels
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167540
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She wanted wolf cubs. Not kittens, not husky pups given as infant gifts with red bows around their scraggy necks. No, she wanted wolf cubs. Even when it grew to pace the length of her hallway - proud as men - she could not love it. …
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167591
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Literary agents, also editors,
But most assuredly not my creditors,
Someday they won’t mean jack to me—
The people who won’t get back to me.
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167532
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He took the car out into the middle of Nowhere, Mexico, and drove it at top speed, off-road for a day and a night. I am talking strut-breaking, axle-wrecking, wheel-bending, paint-peeling conditions and balls-to-the-wall, testosterone-drunk driving.
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167544
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It was like watching one of those vintage eighteen-frames-per-second films of someone trying to open a stuck umbrella.
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167463
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There’s an unending parade of drifters, outlaws and crazies and I always have to watch my back, but, then again, that’s nothing new.
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167430
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"Every single thing ... " Hunk Hokum pronounced from the stage, flexing his muscles and prancing around in his red pseudo-loincloth, "has been totally scripted ... and ... every action ... has been ... preplanned-out ... in advance!"
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167464
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Luke was in the gutter, his face in stagnant water littered with cigarette butts, condom wrappers, and green shards of glass from broken beer bottles. A man was kicking him in the face with a boot the size of a U-boat, over and over and over again. Blood
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167494
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Creep up behind me one day and prick my skin. I promise you won’t draw blood – for it is ink that will spurt from my veins.
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167422
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an awkward stage between
glued popsicle stick marsupial,
and mechanical tin foil mammal.
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167410
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Pay attention: our names were Bobby, Didi, Joanie, Mitch and Sam. It was popular in those days to wear big name buttons across your chest, and we’d line up side-by-side as we watched our reflections affix said buttons, anchoring them to our stiff lapels
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167400
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As airplanes fly low over her children playing in the kiddie pool on the front lawn, Maureen learns something else about her father's new house that lies in the flight path of an international airport.
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16742112
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It chases other newborns down and eats them.
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