1467 4 5
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Paulette lived on the east side on Paulette Avenue. Mama dropped me off when we wanted to play Barbies. Her neighborhood was a little green lily pad in a swamp of blight and disrepair. A ghetto moat ringed around those three fancy blocks like a first line of defense,…
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146786
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remembering Cahokia, a place we rent near the water's edge, for we dare not enter
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146741
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@font-face { font-family: "Cambria"; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; } …
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146731
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Fat robins are chirping –
loudly – at 4 a.m.
They’re trying to delude
the worms into thinking it’s
dawn already
The worms get up underground
They’re grumpy, they
bump into things
They come up to the surface
and Wham! That
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146770
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He came running out of his narrow little shop, Berthillon
and chased me down the Ilse St. Louis street, saying,
“Monsieur, Monsieur, nous avon pamplemousse!
It’s ici, Monsieur. Your pamplemousse.
They just come in this matin, morning
and I’
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146744
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My father's cousin is Salem the Dead.
Famed, an infant Lazarus of Libya,
he was brought lifeless from the womb,
yet awoke to the chill of a mortuary slab.
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14671210
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My little friend is no bigger than a minute. An even five feet tall, if that.
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146753
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“There’s no real freedom in this world. But a car and the open road is close enough for government work.”
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146742
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I started walking around the Jube like any other sheep, lemming, or penguin: passing plate glass windows, one after another.
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14671613
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He'd hung above her head for months.
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1467128
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I was hope, and
you were what I can only call
consolation, as day after day you
remained a grief in my throat.
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146720
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And now, the weather. The Cloud Wranglers have roped three solid clouds this morning, preventing the clouds from raining iron bars onto Human Brain Storage Center #17.
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146765
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It's just another night in the old city, perched in the skeletal radio tower with my collection of telescopes
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146762
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Sometimes one person's shelter is another person's storm.
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146600
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[CAUTION: READING THIS STORY COULD CAUSE IRREPARABLE "CULTURE SHOCK" AND IS NOT ADVISED FOR OLD FOLKS, PREGNANT WOMEN, OR THOSE WITH "MONSTROUS, FRAGILE EGOS"!]
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146631
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He sees how he could release the duck, imagines it winging low over the water to where the others have made it safely.
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1466107
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1466116
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I might wish I was anything
including some dust on the shelf
where maybe I might blow away
unseen like the coming of rust
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146652
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You stand in the mirror. You see yourself. You stand sideways; your profile is always your best. You tuck in your stomach, you stick out your ass but it's the same. You stand face front. You shiver. The mirror adds weight to your already sagging breasts, the wrinkles…
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146682
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The ocean smelled like decomposed plant life and clinically despicable vagina, but I still spoke of its power and my fear of it in moonlit clichés and she still listened.
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14661811
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"We gotta get out of here", you said
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146665
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go ahead
stick one more morsel
into that piehole
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146622
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He just had to tell somebody. Anybody.
So he called up his publisher, L., who agreed to meet him at Oliveira’s for a drink. It only took about ten minutes to walk there from his big duplex in the Elmwood, where he was still living with his wife among
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146600
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Like some beautiful yet macabre puppet, she was suspended on strings of wire, painstakingly threaded tubing flowing into her cavities, through her chambers, around her mechanics.
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146675
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...the daffodils will fling/
their yellow petals, taunting winter
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1466118
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He liked to take pictures of her, and she liked to pose. It made her horny, she said.
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1466136
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146522
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Mo Dean woke up sober.
And tired.
Tired of life, of soiled pants, rash, vomit, and whiskey sweat. Tired of holes in his pockets and blisters on his feet, of hanging signs asking for dimes and getting only pennies. And most of all, tired of the police.
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146588
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It is the first day of summer, a blue-green afternoon, and we sit beneath the English oak, Quercus robur. Everything has at least two names. It is the first day of summer, or the last day of something else.
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146500
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I'm a jogger of these parts, but I've yet to discover a dead body, or even dead body parts, or worse yet, discover that my parts will be discovered by some unfortunate jogger.
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