1471 9 11
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The brain taints everything it brings to us/
with its limited apparatus, its precepts,//
all the things it thinks it knows.
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147143
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Philosophy: a muscular exercise of throat, jaw, tongue, and brain.
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147176
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I almost caught a poet today.
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147165
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147100
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The streets were filled with animals of the forest. All in a panic trying to find a direction. Mixed among them were members of various Clans that lived in the forest.
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147110
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I'm waiting for your voice. My trembling hand is so damp the phone could slip from my fragile grasp at any moment. Each ring burns in my ear and makes the washing machine in my stomach tumble faster and faster. After three rings, or it could be four, or forty, I hear…
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147101
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I take her hand. More grey dust rolls off the arms, over the railing, into the wind. It’s embarrassing and I let go. I think she told me to throw them away months ago.
I rub her bare thigh. She laughs real soft like. The corner of her lip curls up.
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147165
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(the hourglass has not gone digital, oh no,/but these days, silicon is in with the sand)
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147101
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On the street / The protesters stand / Yelling words empty as wind
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147155
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In an authentic Irish pub in Las Vegas where over much crowd noise the three of us are discussing Yeats, Joyce and Lady Gregory. We’re in an Irish pub after all, plus the fact we’re literature profs attending a Vegas academic conference.
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147145
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After my mother died, my father shipped me to my uncle's. He hadn't told me she was dying, so he could just mourn alone.Lena lived next door, Italian, my age -- which was ten -- beautiful. She was watched by goons in black suits. Her parents owned a restaurant. Across the…
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147174
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"I’ve always wanted to write a novel. Like Catch-22, something off-beat that would start by word-of-mouth, you know, and become an underground classic."
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147100
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Won't speak a word against 'em. Car trunk stunk like bad chicken long after, but I won't speak a word against 'em.
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147132
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#2 The Typewriter Inside You by Harmon Gentle—I found this one at a garage sale when I was 15. Intended as a manual for sharpening one's typing skills, by the third chapter it became obvious that Mr. Gentle's sanity had slipped, and that rather than mastering the…
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147100
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We named her Big Cat—I don’t know why. Maybe because she was already grown when we got her, unlike the kittens we’d seen in the pet store window that Dad wouldn’t let us have.
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147111
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Shirley stubbed her cigarillo out on a dead chunk of honeycomb.
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147193
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147011
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No chance for Hallo, we sank into an unlit station doorway and he fumbled through my shorts.
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147021
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We all thought, Birds! We all thought, Nests inside the chimney!
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1470105
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The washing machine at home was broken. It was an old leaky Maytag. A discouraging mess—twisted panties, sky-blue jeans, and an old lover or two or three floating downstream (the reverse of spawning salmon). Each man was slightly drowned,…
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1470910
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When the dark shadows of his limp eyes told us life was slowly seeping away, stolen by his stroke, his wife signed the “DO NOT RESUSCITATE” order and, tearfully leaving the room, she turns, asking a final question, “Think a needy family could use his…
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147062
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We cannot cross the river until it freezes. Bekker predicts January. For food we gather leaves, berries and roots from the thick forest behind the cabin. Suarez boils what we find into a revolting paste that we spoon into our mouths with dirty fingers.
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1470108
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like the Bible in / Mauritania, like a mouse in a vial of ammonia, / like a retired coal miner on vacation in the Alps
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147033
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Welcome the one and the all of you, welcome all you scraggly long haired weeds, welcome the no longer rolling stones of the new you, welcome you most beautiful little wonderfully…
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147072
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This is what it is to feel yourself forget.
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147064
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Poetry is conceit; emotional, intellectual or technical.
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1470108
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I never took more than a few pills at a time, just enough for a treat on Friday night.
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147062
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A white room is empty but for you, a card table and a chair.
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1470105
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“Now,” my friend said. “Tell us about earthquakes. Can we expect one anytime soon?”
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147021
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I am exceeded / by a leaf
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