1419 2 2
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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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1419 9 3
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Remembering his body makes me think of Egyptian cotton sheets dried in the sun. He smelled crisp and clean even after sweating hard. His hair fell in golden spirals down his cheeks, his back, over his forehead, and captured light just like the gilded halos on…
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1419 5 5
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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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1419 0 2
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We’d told her that Kasey waitressed. We talked about it a lot, trying to figure something out. I wanted to be honest with her. Kasey said she was too young to understand. I said that was why honesty wouldn’t hurt anything. Kasey said what about later.
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1419 6 3
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My father seems anxious about my gender orientation. I grew up looking like a boy, acting like a boy. He bought dresses and girly stuff for me but he avoided making an issue of it until recently.
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1419 0 0
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I play in the dirt with cattle bones
while Mother rattles the sky.
She tells me I have my fathers eyes.
The words come through bloody fissures in her lips.
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1419 5 1
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A dead deer on the side of the road and the older boys not listening to her as they stab its eye with a stick.
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1419 13 10
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This time the bag's bigger/than the boy and the door.
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1419 7 6
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in a willow garden lush shade/drapes dark the young woman's small house/with the lone window, the white door . . .
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1419 4 2
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Blankets were always her undoing.
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1419 0 0
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Every morning when he wakes, he lies in bed and waits for one of his toes to twitch or spasm; the moment he feels one of them thrust forward, he gains courage to test his legs. He grimaces either way: one more day of walking, one more day until loss, one more trip to the…
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1419 1 1
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I knew we were going to fail. The night we met, when we got out of the car, I dropped my green glove in that puddle, you picked it up but it was ruined. That set the precedent for our whole life together. You can't look at me anymore. My cigarette…
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1419 1 1
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Come to the park and swing with me, sing with me.
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1419 1 1
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It matters little who thought of it first, what mattered was the schism. Or, to be more accurate, those on the opposite sides of the schism. And, of course, you are a part of this, dear reader. You are of one side or the other.
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1419 5 4
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when i was five or six/ we lived in an apartment/ and every sunday/ i'd lie on the carpet/ to watch squares of sunshine/ crawl across the rug/ while my mother inflicted upon us/ a centuries-long hour of television/ worse than any droning mass.
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1419 0 0
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Ayane took another look of the area and it was large warehouse. A loud thud vibrated outside.
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1419 11 9
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The Poisoning I used to call my dad Serpico. Thirty years on the police force, and though a respected officer, he never fit in. He never had beers with the guys at the end of a shift or engaged in the more lewd locker room talk. None of the other cops were privy to which…
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1418 0 0
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Azure took the paper and read it herself. She wondered about those four mysterious beings that communicated with her.
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1418 5 4
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Been looking for guns.
His guns have turned up missing.
He’s been looking for the guns.
Looking for guns.
The au-pair must’ve snuck back in
And took the guns.
And the baby.
The baby must be crawling off with
Guns again.
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1418 11 5
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The smell of garlic, soy, and onions/
exhausted from Skillman Wok/
perfumes December air.
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1418 1 0
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Marcy was not herself today, her mother said when the school called. She was under the weather and she could not play with the other children. Marcy's mother began to suspect that her daughter was not herself very early on that day. Walking up the stairs Dolores…
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1418 1 1
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A mundane endeavor depicted as a quest. Try it, you'll like it!
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1418 13 12
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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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1418 5 1
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you'd do him more of a favor to kill him, than place upon him the burden of such an abrupt change in travel plans.
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1418 5 4
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I find myself in an unfamiliar restaurant, its cuisine an uncomfortable pastiche of Croatian, Burmese, Jamaican and leftovers of long ago Sunday dinners in a small New England town.
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1418 10 8
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The first night I met her we slow danced to George Strait songs for most of the evening and when we took a break, our talking went warm and well as we sat eating hot dogs and sipping beers until she dropped a couple of bombs, first, telling me she was married and then, that…
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1418 12 8
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Compartments trickle together/
in light diffuse and unreliable./
Fortify yourself against the day.
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1418 0 0
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The first apartment Troy and Lynn lived in was managed by an alcoholic former army officer, who lived in the complex with his wife and teenage daughter. He was a lush who didn't do much in the way of management. Lynn had barely noticed him before Troy moved in with her.…
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1418 4 4
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We'll all face the raging river, some sooner than others.
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1418 1 1
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Pen or sword? Pick one/choose your battles carefully/for the paths oppose
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