1655 8 7
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I was at Mike's place when the call came. My brother sounded so accusing that I wanted to punch him in the face. But he was way upstate. "Dad died today," he said, as if I could have somehow known or prevented it. It was sudden. A heart attack. He was…
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1655 2 2
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I am heading to work. It's early and Clare is still asleep. When I hit the breezeway I realize that I forgot my keys. I walk back into the house and start rustling through the junk on the table by the door. After a moment I sense someone standing behind me and…
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1655 0 0
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In the grip of a bad dream, she bolted awake, thinking she had heard the nightsounds of a tomcat crawling around her property.
It was some dreaded hour before dawn; she had no idea when. Her small, frail body was stiff, her breasts swollen and sore to
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1655 8 6
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My ex-girlfriends live in a pastel-drenched cabin on the edge of a hemlock forest in Canada somewhere,
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1655 11 8
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Me and Dale chuck rocks at it.
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1654 7 4
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God damn you women get me all /
twisted up thinking oohrahrah and lala
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1654 16 12
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A little poem about prison
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1654 41 28
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She pulled into the doorway. Uncertain where to spend the night. Certain there'd once been a place with food. Here. This place. She remembered. Curtains. Small tables. Coffee cups thick-handled and sturdy. Crockery.
Some words came back.
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1654 4 1
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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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1654 6 2
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Two women sat at a small round table near the sidewalk waiting for the same man.
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1654 0 0
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I met Barry Hannah once in my life. I’d come to Oxford, MS, to meet an entirely different writer whom I thought then and think now very highly of. I’d also come to escape from another slew of regrets. Oxford is a great city to run away to.
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1654 14 7
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We flew./
In my dreams, I can fly.
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1654 4 3
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Prabo was late.
It wasn’t like him, I thought, sitting on the steps of the Galle Face Hotel, the Indian Ocean pounding the beach abutting the nearby Galle Face Green and spraying fine mist everywhere. Or at least it didn’t seem like him.
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1654 4 3
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Don't throw earth on bones.
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1654 7 7
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fuck you Charles Bukowski
go cry in your eggs in a Jersey diner
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1654 5 2
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Ben considered his options in the taxi to Charles De Gaulle airport.
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1654 0 0
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If they don’t cover consequences in your gifted and talented program, you may care to research it.
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1654 5 1
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And suddenly, I have this crazy impulse, so crazy and so puzzling I do not possess enough vocabulary and grammar skills to describe what is invisible and what is visible about it. The reader must excuse me and be attentive.
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1654 5 6
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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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1654 5 3
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Maybe you, citizen, should be a jerk. Jerks get where they are going. You, citizen, what about you? Handy, dandy, where’s the jerk? Conformists. Sheep. All of you, all of us, boiling out our radiators. Spending our day, our days, our lives in coope
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1653 0 0
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The church pews were straining at the crowds who had come to see David get saved. There was no salvation in the water really, but the Baptists preached the gospel of immersion. There was a certain Baptist church in Kentucky that pressured a man who'd been sprinkled to get…
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1653 0 0
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“Imagine a Shakespearean scholar coming upon an undiscovered work by the Bard. That’s how thrilling this is."
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1653 11 8
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"I remember thinking, 'Good.'
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1653 6 4
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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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1653 2 0
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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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1653 5 4
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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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1653 7 0
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On the way to the drinking fountain, Elysia Martin, a third grader at St. Michael's Parochial School, heard a voice calling her name. When she turned toward the white plaster statue of the Virgin Mary that sat between twin hedges in the rose garden, she
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1653 4 2
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There is nothing literal about the color of strawberries. It is a beauty too celestial for this world. It can only be imagined.
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1653 4 0
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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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1653 11 8
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I was sleeping the night of a hurricane party. I awoke to lightning flashes. They lit the undersides of descending clouds, and lit the shadows of scattering dancers. The hurricane must have turned inland.
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