1420 8 6
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At some point we all reach the end point/
of something. Something important/
if only to our fragile self esteem.
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1420 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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1420 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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1420 0 2
|
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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1420 6 4
|
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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1420 4 4
|
We'll all face the raging river, some sooner than others.
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1420 5 1
|
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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1420 2 1
|
He and she are fucking while I watch. She's moaning deep desire and he's pounding flesh into flesh. I'm fully clothed, eyes attune to their fornication, studying. He comes inside of her; their bodies stiffen and then wriggle against one another. …
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1420 4 3
|
"You're no good at sex, no good at drugs and, god knows, no good at rock and roll."
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1420 0 0
|
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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1420 1 1
|
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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1420 2 1
|
His touch, even now, seemed to set off tremors inside her.
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1420 11 9
|
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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1419 1 0
|
On Friday evenings they play Scrabble, a whole crowd of them. They use books to keep score, page numbers, instead of a long column of pencil scratches. They organize themselves into teams; the English majors all together, versus biology, history and horn players. She and he…
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1419 2 2
|
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 10 8
|
One day, my feet and hands got into an argument. My feet argued that they were superior because they were not only the foundation of my body, but the cause of its mobility. They were modest in size, yet supported and transported an entire body that towered over them.…
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1419 1 0
|
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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1419 0 0
|
I should have never gotten involved in such a huge lie. I was a poet, for God's sake, not a novelist. I wasn't used to lying.
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1419 1 1
|
A mundane endeavor depicted as a quest. Try it, you'll like it!
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1419 5 1
|
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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1419 10 8
|
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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1419 6 3
|
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 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
|
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 2 1
|
Only fragments of their lives survive, like broken Sapphos. I have known them, alleged killer of themselves for the love of a man., but we know this is an invention. The leader of a whole guild of girls, who wrote 7 books of poems. What happened to them
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1419 1 1
|
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
|
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
|
Osama couldn’t see any reason he shouldn’t retire. No way he could top BP Oil in the Gulf or Pacific Gas & Electric in San Bruno.
|
1419 0 0
|
Ayane took another look of the area and it was large warehouse. A loud thud vibrated outside.
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1418 6 6
|
It’s Independence Day. But I’m not feeling independent.
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