1554 4 4
|
A rope is cleaner,
he explains with a straight face.
He's calmed by the visual.
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155343
|
It was a wake-up call. A sign that I needed to stop and ask if I was making wise and sensible life choices.
My iPod was full.
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155355
|
Style Shifts “Oh, yes, my cousin. We were rude boys until the armed gangs started to gather. Used to be we could pass a night driving, playing our songs, acting tough. Yeah. We'd mouth off, flash some teeth, spark some anger when we felt like it. We…
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155310
|
Even before I tap on the door I know I am being watched with one eye. My footsteps have surely given me away. A swift tug on it reveals her to me—half of her, that is, and I slink past the threshold, to her. From her eyes I see that she has…
|
155322
|
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...
|
15531312
|
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…
|
155361
|
I would like to go back (with spade, pick, soft bristles), and sift through time and layers, brush away the intervening years, and find: the tooth, knocked out by my then best friend, when we were seven, careening downhill in my father's wheelbarrow on Boscobel…
|
155362
|
|
155344
|
So for now, let the snow fall, but
let it fall gently,
each flake as a soft piano note
|
155352
|
—Now that’s a hell-of-a-painting, Frank, he said. Those colors are engaged in warfare. How the hell did you do that?
|
155321
|
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…
|
1553115
|
Among the raindrops/
occasional plopping snowflakes.
|
155378
|
Reprisal The bomb blew away hubris, shocked the arrogant bastards into humiliated silence. None of them had experienced hunger and they'd misjudged its effect. In the lobby of the palace, dirt, plaster, glass shifted, rumbled,…
|
155343
|
|
155311
|
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
|
155353
|
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
|
1553126
|
|
155200
|
What do I understand?
What have I mastered or come to terms with?
|
155254
|
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…
|
155271
|
She talks about window treatments, how the place is maybe too much for one. Wants me to know she’s not much of a cook, and wants me to smell what’s in her oven and compliment her cooking anyway.
|
1552116
|
I said hey man, how you doin’? He looked up and nodded but his shades flashed and I couldn’t see his eyes.
|
155262
|
And she was thinking of him, right now, at this very moment, scurrying like mad, desperate and frantic like in those dreams where you’re late and trying to get somewhere but can’t, not wanting to blow this opportunity...
|
1552124
|
It will always be this way/ won’t it, she said.
Me insecure, you unfaithful
|
1552128
|
We suffer//
the one agony only- of having no longer/
any physical effect nor way to speak/
of what we watch to those we watch.
|
155255
|
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…
|
155220
|
My brother Herb married his high school sweetheart right after completing college. This was a girl named Beryl, whom he'd met originally in Mr. Reinert's marching band at York High School in Elmhurst. I remember one day in particular in the middle of the
|
155221
|
She’s always had one foot on a pedestal and the other in a gutter.
|
155242
|
I was in life, in my dream. I was feeling around underneath your clothing. My fingers were shining in the underwater afterlife of memory, searching for those lovely nipple-sized mollusks. I lived in a land somewhere between the past and the future. Now
|
155200
|
“Got a big one boy! He's movin' real fast! Don't think he has had time to eat the bait just yet, so we need to play him out. Let the hook set. Don't want to loose him! Get the net ready!”
|
155265
|
To listen is to feel embodied reason//
sing and dance with consummate grace
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