1556 3 2
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“Life is on life’s terms,” she told me once. Her arm, wrapped in clear cellophane, was freshly adorned with a green-pigmented sand-dollar: a living shell.
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155653
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Buyers of freelance writing have a well-deserved reputation for responding slowly, thereby increasing your pleasure in much the same way that the Pointer Sisters longed for a slow hand.
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155654
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The coin, so little, the watch chain, the youth, the fading softening speech, each hand and finger, the panic modeled on your own eyes, the ashtray, certain stumps along the way, the long distance, the odd feather, the jazz rope gone,…
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155631
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The man had decided that this was going to be his last day. He’d find out one final thing and he’d be done. He had spent the last few years of his life unwinding things that had been wound and untying knots that had been tied.
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155665
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Remember when we went to New York to take our test? We looked for cheap hotels near the test site, and there was the "Hotel Earle." Twelve bucks a night. The clerk behind bullet-proof glass, smiling a knowing smile. Pubes still on the sheets, but we couldn't sleep anyway,…
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155631
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When our body falters, deny us rest.
When our minds crack under the strain, forbid us sanity.
When we are too tired to fight give us war.
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155653
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Rose lifted her 55-year-old legs until they were perpendicular to the bed and admired how girlish they looked. It gave her the sexy legs of a 20-year old, if the morning light was right and she squinted a bit.
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155631
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"seventy five degrees longitude
submerged
in holy rivers
out of my mind emerge
anointed paramahamsas"
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155533
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155587
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First he wrote it in wet cement at the intersection:
“Tad Loves Kimberley,”
with a big heart around it.
He was real proud, you could see.
But then later on that year, the graffiti began
appearing everywhere, on all the store walls:
“Kimberle
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155500
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Two angels walk in a dark cloud arm in arm
discussing the nature of good and evil
Walking along in flowing robes now that nakedness
is forgot, and they both stare at the same eternal thought
with their heads bowed as serenity is the only thing
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155522
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Tomorrow, they'd bury their daughter . . . and still, so many questions. Why would a beautiful fourteen-year-old choose for herself such a horrible, painful death? In life, she appeared the antithesis of suicidal ideation: excellent grades, well-liked in school and…
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1555143
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Of all the authors in the library, it was a wife from Maryland who called out from her marriage dormer I was not to read her.
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155533
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When John wakes up, the first thing he does is run a bath, because his shower is broken, and while the bath is running he gets his breakfast ready.
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155554
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Christmas night was closing in at the Cantrips alehouse in Aberdeen, a firm favourite for riggers and other men and women who lived life close to the horizon. Sometimes, on a Saturday night, things might get a bit rowdy but Mother O'Grady would stand firm and bring out…
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155521
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Looming ahead was another polite suburban party at which, after a couple of pops, I'd say something that embarrasses my wife in front of her girlfriends. Or so she claims.
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155532
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She flew through the air, linen skirt billowing around her. Below, her buckled bicycle was taking a different route. Less aerodynamic than she, its trajectory was brief, crashing into the ditch. Elspeth kept on flying. Time slowed, and expanded
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155511
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Route 346 is the way Pop drove to Troy long after everybody else took Route 2. Today Charlie and I drive in the opposite direction. Back then, Pop drove us to Troy on Route 346 on Sunday afternoons with the car windows…
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1555108
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155522
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The next day we were sitting at that same outdoor café on the square, trying to savor a peaceful meal of duck plucked fresh from the Vltava River, when the very same waiter passed by and said, “Bet you wish you had some peeg now, no?” There were camer
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1555104
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feet that would run until their soles were pages of Gideon’s Bibles, worn too thin to touch
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155555
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We pull up chairs. I breathe in her Bath and Body Works vanilla, read her paper slowly and aloud because the ears catch what the eyes miss. Her sentences are awkward, stilted.
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1555157
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I fondly remember those warm, weekend evenings at twilight on the beach. After the frolic of the waves flattened, sending the surfers home and, after the last bait was spent, sending the surfcasters away, I'd set up the little, foldable, 3‘x4', rectangular stage I always…
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155552
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Hissing through the opening, the spirits have no place.
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155575
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o christ/ here you are again/ you sickness appearing in my brain/ pouring smog from my jaw/ my body hot and cold as though sleepless/ while i could sleep/ centuries/ undisturbed/ and awaken, tireder still./
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1555188
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Jesus is for sale. But he’s heavy.
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155541
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On our back porch, the tiki torches are lit and so am I.
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155585
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155465
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faith in gravity/permitted them to extol/the guillotine's blade.
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15541410
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The knees remind you: you are old,/
and broken, and unlikely to improve
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