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For a few/
vivid weeks, deciduous shrubs and trees/
will seem to glow like flames and embers
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some days are
minotaur shit on your tongue/
smokestacks dumping acid rain on your already thinning hair
your eyelashes pinned in upside down, backward/you give wrong shaving directions to the mirror
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Instead, I get things like,
“Why can’t you find a nice man with cancer or a bum leg?”
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They teach that emotional pain is physical pain, culture pain is science pain, but they cannot test for the absence of these synaptic conclusions. I will say, if you can test me and find something missing then you can supplement me for the missing thing.
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This story* is brought to you by
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He just up and dropped dead one day, Charles said. Pretty tough on Karen, I opined. Charles looked the other way.
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“I was just dreaming about you,” he said, sleepy-voiced. “What's for breakfast?”
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Infinity occurs as an afterthought, for discoverers like Columbus as for countries like America.
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The elders of the town will tell you that as soon the prophet mill arrived everything went to Hell. Before the process was streamlined, prophets used to be grown organically in the community. They popped up only where the ground was tilled and a prayer was planted. They…
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Palms planted firmly against his temples, Travis paced the room like a caged animal. Giant black bats screeched in his brain, their pointy wings scraping at the edges of his cranium.
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At a rest stop in Montpelier, they stopped to buy Cokes and gum from the vending machines. He was showing off, trying to jimmy one of the locks with a safety pin but it stayed locked and she laughed at him and he said goddamn, look at all a them Milkyways
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Thirty years later – and all the years in between – Alan Walton would remember how insidious it was, the anger that started that night with Quinton Harris, fifteen years old and the undisputed leader of the troop, and spread like a virus to the other boys
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I become the accumulation/
of appetites
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But Jake doesn't hear anything. He is pure, unfiltered, liquid rage. Jake kicks Rolex dude once, twice, five times in the ribs. On the last kick, there is a snapping sound.
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A delicate thrill buzzed my face.
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When we arriveand are met by strange friendsstrange like the fog on the redreed mudflatsthat span the low tide around Incheon -When we arrivecarrying so much we will not needlike the bus they hire to take us through the darksix people to fill so much more space - When…
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Once again there's too much to handle and
no space to process
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in their hunt for desires not felt on either side of the crescent /
called Gowanus
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under your skin the moon is alive
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We ask was that me? The one on the corner with his hat tipped to the jaunty side? I've wore hats, I've stood on corners. Am I not jaunty?
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The universe will fuck you over in the end./
That’s what it does, what it’s good at—
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it felt fucking awesome at that moment, in that way only little things can feel huge and life affirming
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Forgetting her inhibitions, she dove for him.
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Six months later, she was teaching theology / to refugees from est.
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Her cash. It smelled like seven-dollar-a-quart gardenia perfume and cave aged cheese—like hope overgrown with mildew.
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I contemplate the words that did not make it; the lost ones. The words deprived of their moment in the sun. These words. These words that are not part of the story.
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Until the ivy hides me in
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The flash of love was real, the life within her was real, and the main thing now was to climb.
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You want to get laid talking socks
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