1515 1 1
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She clutched her fat rolls and tugged on a pant leg. "I'm so embarrassed! You caught me on a bad day!"
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1515 6 4
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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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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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1515 0 0
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“She’s very sick. She’s dying,” and he smoothed my hair along my neck.
“It’s leukemia. A very rare type,” his hand reached my shoulder and stopped there.
“She only has a few months.”
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1515 8 4
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We may think about so many things and thoughts about rain. We may think about where it is going, where it comes from.
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1515 5 3
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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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1515 0 0
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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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1514 0 1
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She could see him doing these things but she could not hear him.
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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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1514 2 1
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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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1514 2 1
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It was a strange mood, unfamiliar, not one of her usual “I'm busy wrestling with my personal demons” type of moods. She'd been steeped in it all day and I, like a shipwrecked victim reaching out for any piece of flotsam…
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1514 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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Sometimes you have to go wild; you have just to go fucking nuts. You do.
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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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Zusman snored on the sofa as Motel gathered his belongings in the dark. He moved quietly as had become his custom in the mornings. Initially he had tried not to wake his nephew on his way to work in the…
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1514 4 3
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The plane passes the runway, dips sharply, its shadow straight down below, too cold in the cabin, the sun hitting your arm like a machete below, it is 94, the humidity too, it has just rained for 3 days, it never rains this time of year......
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1514 3 1
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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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1514 5 0
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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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1514 1 1
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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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1514 6 0
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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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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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1514 5 1
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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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1513 4 3
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Her son was doubtless the biggest wanksta that ever went to Andrew Jackson in the whole crumby history of the school.
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1513 4 3
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Philosophy: a muscular exercise of throat, jaw, tongue, and brain.
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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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My wife, Sheila, inadvertently clicked my e-mail address, too, when she sent her reply back to him and I read her poet friend's message that her love opened the window of his heart and she replied that his words were knocks that opened the door to her being, then I stood…
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1513 6 4
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In a field of barley, I see you, ...
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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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1513 8 6
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I'm working through the rocky pine cones so you don't have to. I'm stepping over the little dreaming people in your dreams so we don't wake them with our loud and coming loose footprints. The poem passes by like a heartbreaking train…
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