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My wife is an angel.
When I was a kid, that’s what we believed dead people were. Sitting on a cloud with a halo and a harp. We learned it from cartoons, but I think I’ve heard angels are supposed to be their own order, like
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2814138
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I always have a serious expression on my face, am usually in a white coat and probably look completely unapproachable but there I am, and pasted in my scrapbook: Local Doctor Saves Another Life.
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28131510
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Of only there were more like you,
I wouldn't be changing careers.
And my drawings would still be in magazines,
instead of on strange people's rears.
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28121812
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She looked up, blinked. Fuck are you? I shook my head. Nobody you’ll remember, I said.
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28122519
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We were the same and different. I was wild, wild, and she was calm. A pair of dolls we were. Holding hands in thin white dresses. Running through fields. Spying on boys. Making small things from grass and weed and wildflower. One day (it was a Tuesday) al
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28093617
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Eat slowly. Wait. Do not bring reading material. Do not bring headphones. Avoid distractions.
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28052220
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We were always thrilled that the moon worked the night shift. In high school, often bored with the two drive-in movies, we'd sometimes go to tent revivals on our dates and get healed or get saved depending upon what that “tent-housed”…
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28051818
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and all the beautiful girls are in the river
And they went in dirty
But they came out clean
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280372
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I was seeking punishment so I put my lips around a bright green persimmon and bit down, the bitterness of its flesh overcame me...
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28022010
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We construct a paper bridge. The droid walks across it. We follow, one after another, like sentences in a story.
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280223
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The receiving line stretched into the lobby of the funeral home, which was decorated with faded Waverly wallpaper, dirty lemon yellow carpeting, and the kind of ornate white furniture I used to want in my bedroom when I was a little girl. The people in th
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280252
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Her eyes were brown. But he wasn’t sure. He looked again: her eyes were blue. Her eyes were blue, and looking straight at him.
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280031
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TEXT TO VICKY
This sucks! Sorry for the teen-speak Vicky, but it does. You saw me in the hospital. It's just as bad at home. They still don't know what to do for my smashed voice box. I probably won't ever speak again. (Maybe with a mechanical thing lik
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27973719
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It had been so long since the telephone had rung, he’d forgotten the sound.
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2794132
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They stumble and curse prettily, their thin arms traversed with colored lines of drainage from the swooping trays, snakes of pricey liquor tinkling down their armpits and disappearing into unwashed bras packed with soggy filler.
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279354
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It rained on the morning of the party, and the weatherman promised it would continue throughout the day. But Marilyn didn't mind. She actually preferred entertaining in bad weather. Her rugs weren't valuable enough to worry about, and the gloomier the sky
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27931110
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‘Last week,’ I said, ‘on the radio, there was a competition. The DJ played a sound-bite of a car going over a cattle grid, and people had to phone in to guess which cattle grid it was. I didn’t phone in, but I knew the answer.’
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2793139
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27912217
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Mama reads about UFOs in paperback books and newspapers with big cloudy pictures. Her girlfriends know about flying saucers, too. They get drunk at night when they are sitting all alone in their living rooms because they are divorced or married to men who
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279077
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My father-in-law is drunk. This is something only my husband and I know: the old man does not stagger or flail, he is not vacant; neither too-friendly nor hostile to the woman who shows us to a table and sets down three bundles of silverware wrapped in paper…
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278976
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Soon the entire sky load of constellations
was carried across the bumpy fields
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27891411
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“When he felt most loved, he felt most _ burdened.” Stephen Dobyns When she loved him she burdened him. She knew he felt a pull but he always resisted it. They went to an old refurbished hotel in Venice and asked if they might see the rooms. …
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27862115
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The dog is there, on sorry legs, with sorry claws. He looks toward the man, the bat, and says, You know me, Man. I know you know me.
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27852018
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The doctor told me:
"You have 24 hours
to live.
no more, no less."
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278593
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You’re often photographed at Martha’s Vineyard at sunrise, Key West on New Year’s Day, Coney Island on Christmas, and variously at dive bars in Montauk. You’re a woman of a certain age and you are also a woman of the world. You’re a 21st century
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278474
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“In retrospect, perhaps I should ask my renter’s insurance to cover damage from lava lamp discharges. But I am not a person who enjoys a fracas.”
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27842213
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When you live in New Orleans, the only time you ever get to see cows is at the Winn-Dixie 24 Hour Super Store, in the back between the dairy and the seafood.
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278411
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So you want to know my earliest realization that I was just another boob consumer? Trace it back to my Star Wars Action figure days. Fish out the collapsible C3PO from a war-torn pile of crummy Jawas and Storm Troopers, no they're all out of Snaggletooth
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2784137
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It will be a beautiful, luminous, rollicking, transcendent book, the manuscript smudged with tomato sauce and tears.
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278331
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Lying there, with the terrible screech emanating from his chest, blaring from his open mouth, he thinks about jet planes and jack hammers and nuclear explosions. He doesn't have quiet thoughts.
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