1516 3 2
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Dearest Z— There is no way to describe this place. It is a pendulum, caught at mid-swing or maybe just a millimeter on the up side. It is a sense of sweeping, a cleanness. Distant clouds remind me of the day we took the train and the mountains acted petulantly,…
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1516157
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Her voice gets screechy as she talks of the boy he was caught fondling in the bathroom of a bowling alley. The worst part: the dumb schmuck doesn’t even bowl.
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151664
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She stiffens and blusters and roars
Not like a storm,
Not like a lion.
Like a badger, caught in the steel jaws of a trap.
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151600
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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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1516147
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At some point, you care/
just enough to wake each morning,
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151650
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Flicking the cigarette into the river the man's face becomes soft, as if waving goodbye to the only real attachment that he has felt in decades.
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151611
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Where the skin had grazed, shredded by the coarse gravel to form scabs, fascinated Jack. It reminded him of his youth and his own grazes, scratches and stitches. As a boy he imagined scabs were rough foundations of igneous rock, blood like lava pouring th
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151660
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The Star Trek marathon ends, and he flips channels. An episode of Full House is on. The cheesy plot lines and attractive women (specifically, DJ Tanner in the late seasons) have become a freakish comfort.
In today's episode, the Tanners are baby sitt
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151600
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My eyes don’t close but hers are shut tight, and something inside tells me that to this girl, I could be absolutely anyone.
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1515179
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A woman who is, say, a culinary arts champion or an heiress devoted to literature such as Bryher (Annie Winifred Ellerman) or Peggy Guggenheim might be able to turn me on, turn me out, turn me around.
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151522
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You have such a complicated mind /
for refusing to believe in God /
just like any damned liberal /
whose fingerprints /
crowd the faces of a thousand /
dollar bills /
being passed around your great nation...
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151554
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After President Trump was elected, my first impulse was to spend the next four years cowering under the bed, whimpering.While I knew that I needed to keep track of what our new commander in chief was up to, watching the news made me too angry and too sad and just too…
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151531
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"Look Emily, I’m charging your solar powered calculator and helping you relieve your dependence on foreign oil."
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151521
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The blaring scream from my alarm clock suffices as my wake-up call. It disrupts me from my dream state that I so rarely get the privilege to experience any more. I've always loathed that alarm clock, so I turn it off in the most sensibly aggressive manner I know how: just…
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151566
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I feel his hand on my face, feel it brush past my lips, and I taste my sister's blood.
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151531
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151578
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In and out of morphine dreams, he flies through the unfinished roof of Illinois sky. Below, matchbox-sized farm machines. A silo becomes his father's thermos, the silver-capped tower from which he stole sips at ten, his first secret. Back …
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151573
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Sometimes you have to go wild; you have just to go fucking nuts. You do.
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151555
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It's been a bad year, People dying. Some too close to home, Some too far away. I cry down to you, In your casket, and think you might sit up. You were not sick You went in just a moment, Looking stunning and alive. Not…
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151554
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They have their own homes to fill with bought and sold dreams. Their own babies to care for and feed. The world is big enough to have more layers than you can ever imagine. The lights will show you a way when you have turned too dark for your own…
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151521
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Naomi hadn't expected them to come in such a big box. When the UPS man tried to hand it to her, she told him there must be some mistake, but then he pointed to her name¾NAOMI BROWN¾right there on the top. When she finally got off all that tape, she had another…
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151512
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she goes jogging with the feet of an angel the sound of crunching leaves like wrapping paper torn open to reveal an expensive doll and the light in her mother's eyes.
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151520
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Night became day and back again in the span of a heartbeat, the familiar strangeness of the sudden change stinging like dust in the eye.
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1515117
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You are a warm winter
Despite the presence of snow
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151531
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I want to read a story that ends unhappily ever after: one where the bad guy wins and no one gets the girl.
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1515108
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That TV you got me? Ruined. And the ionizer fan? Ruined too. All your clothes you left over here, all my work scrubs and weekend dresses too, soaked with that river stink water. I kept thinking bout all the dead creatures.
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151553
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And your daughter, Mrs. P, and your daughter Mrs. Q, underwater, underwater in the old swimming hole, in the backyard swimming pool. “They’ve all got children there.” La la.
Yet when I’m naked, when I enter with my own body the mirror, the small sha
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1515126
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1515108
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He knows I talk to angels, what he would call angels. I don’t talk to him.
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151551
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It’s as she reaches into the fridge for the carton of half-and-half with the grainy waxy photo of the little girl—Last Seen 10/2/06—that the memory surfaces:
“Hey. That’s mine.”
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