2853 17 15
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...He steps back from the abyss,
inner eye envisioning the ink sip of a fountain pen,
the hard, hot brain frenzy that sends phrases marching
toward another bridge between oblivion and art.
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285311
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He walks down the path
Carrying the rice basket
Red foxes lead on
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2853227
|
“Sorry, I farted,” Ted says after the nurse leaves. He squeezes my hand like he’s telling me grave news.
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285220
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Blood smeared in the hugging choke of her courtier. Our only recourse is to confront life with the benefits of a choke. “Please, don't make me force you.” Should misery be a reassurance when love is destroyed? There are reasons: “My wife doesn't live with
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28521812
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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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285211
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The summer of 1974, between high school and college, I got my first real job, paid corporate employment. My mother couldn't stand having me underfoot, sitting around all day, watching TV. She drove me in the family station wagon to a temporary secretarial agency. I told…
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284931
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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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28462220
|
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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284585
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But the silver Corvette is like the inside of a church. It's a sacred place. The white leather interior is spotless, luxurious. The dash is real wood, walnut, he says. He caresses it like a body, like a woman.
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28451510
|
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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284393
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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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284372
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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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284231
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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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28411818
|
and all the beautiful girls are in the river
And they went in dirty
But they came out clean
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28412010
|
We construct a paper bridge. The droid walks across it. We follow, one after another, like sentences in a story.
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284077
|
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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28402519
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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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283900
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As I fed Puff, I thought about the nightmare Lily shared with me that morning. She dreamed Puff had a hole in his throat and all his blood squirted out until he got as small and skinny as a deflated baloon.
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283823
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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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2836132
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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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283652
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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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283476
|
Soon the entire sky load of constellations
was carried across the bumpy fields
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28342018
|
The doctor told me:
"You have 24 hours
to live.
no more, no less."
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28323719
|
It had been so long since the telephone had rung, he’d forgotten the sound.
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28321110
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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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283011
|
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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28273019
|
I went for a walk to buy coffee, here's what I saw
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2827139
|
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28261411
|
“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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28252217
|
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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