1417 7 7
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I could put on some music, but it just pushes me further away from you, so it seems. It takes me out far beyond the safety breakers and then reintroduces me to my own splashing two-fisted fear of swimming. You can swim through …
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1417 6 6
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The four Grannies say, “GO!” and leap from the window. King's pickup is below, and he has lined the bed with his mother's throw pillows. Sundresses fly. Blue plastic diapers billow. They want cigarettes. I light their smokes with King's pearl-handled lighter as…
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1417 4 3
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" History ...is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake."
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1417 4 2
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Years ago, I was involved in a freakish tragedy so startling and heartbreaking that it made the front page of not only my local newspaper, but “People” and “The National Enquirer.” I'm not going to tell you anything about it. This means that…
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1417 5 2
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The increasingly furrowed lines on his forehead made her stomach clench.
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1417 5 0
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"The Chinese don't have no Mardy Grah, bitch."
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1417 2 1
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I stared at these meteor impacts, feeling far away, a lone sentient cloud admiring the scoured yet wondrous earth-of-this-girl below me, the lean slope of her side, the soft dip of her neck, the sharp edge of her cheekbone, the monarch wing of her eyelash
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1417 4 4
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The bartender kept looking at himself in the mirror behind the bar. “Everyone in Hollywood is an actor,” Doc said.
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1417 0 0
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Harv and Julianne He has woken here now, on this bed, and on this particular day, many times. His fifth year in the cabin, his fifth December in Helen, his fifth, he is sure, of many…
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1417 4 2
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Last night we slept with books in the bed.
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1417 5 1
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It starts with a letter, down the back of the couch, ending, ‘love, always.' I read only the kisses aimed at me - a firing line running off the page. How long has that letter hidden there? It secreted itself in a corner of the house…
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1417 3 1
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She's an obese woman whose clothes don't fit: shirts that ride up too high her belly hanging out her pants suctioned to her strangely pegged legs. Her ballooned cheeks are always chapped pink her lips little slivers peeled back over small beige teeth like…
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1417 1 1
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A hinge in my heart is broken.
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1416 4 3
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I killed him. I know you probably don't believe me, but it was an accident. I'll bet everyone in this room knows Dennis Gauda.... or should I say knew him? He was District Governor a while back. He also won quite a few speech contests. Yes... he's competition,…
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1416 2 3
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I. Europa How else to begin but with Gustave Holst's Mars--the gods waging war in romantic twilight as drumbeats and cannons blast swathes in the gloaming and glory awaits in the halls of black smoke. A visual perhaps:…
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1416 5 1
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The clip-clopping of footsteps now echoes from the opposite end of the alleyway, and as you turn to face the figure who appears behind you, the figure wearing a fierce Noh-drama mask, you determine that this time you will enlist its aid in decoding this r
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1416 1 0
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It is your music that makes me want to crack open my ribcage and rip out my heart as it still beats, to cauterize my carotids, and shove the mechanical insides of a clock into my thoracic cavity.
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1416 8 8
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My stories are ramshackle; they lurch along in old sweaters with holes and missing buttons, drinking from mismatched cups and saucers.
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1416 6 4
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I'm an older guy. She is still quite young. I tell her I may be too old but she giggles and tells me that she did the research and it said because there is snow on the roof doesn't mean no fire's in the stove. She proved it. Things like this. We excite ourselves,…
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1416 0 0
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And God said unto the oil can: “Thou art cursed above the cattle, and above every beast of the field. And deep the ground shalt thou go.”
“Mother,” said the oil can, “fucker!”
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1416 4 2
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In the exquisite now, I feel everything around me, in me, before and after, I think, I should call you, say goodnight, but I do not, choose instead to write this poem, as though I can capture the magic of what is happening between us in words, A…
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1416 2 2
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Happy Birthday to me.
It takes just a second on waking to remember,
It's June but it feels like December.
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1416 8 4
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Is this sought sea dream of the Arctic fox? The green below the circles of the white, above her eyes? On Formica tables where the woman smocks beneath glass borders of their vacant smiles, they pass by windows formulating styles,…
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1415 5 5
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Gnarly Berger was born in a guitar case in Istanbul. His mother was an Iranian singer from Israel accompanied by a Turkish santur player & a French guitarist (Gnarly's biological father) and into whose guitar case Gnarly entered this world, somewhat by accident,…
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1415 4 2
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I left Iowa in august when the air was thick and sticky. I had been there three years minus a few days when the boy I'd been sleeping with packed almost everything I owned into my car and waved goodbye. In Baltimore I had few friends and a job teaching English at a…
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1415 8 0
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Beautiful, he thinks, as he taps the ash of his cigarette over the balcony, but this is not good enough.
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1415 5 4
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I would advise the younger you to change your underpants, and not to let those boys do the talking for you.
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1415 5 5
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Another year has flown, crashed to the ground, and convulsed to its death in a final match with the meaninglessness of existence. Decided to try my luck as a Walmart greeter this year but the apomorphine treatment made me break out in hives and I reacted…
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1415 2 2
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Someone shoved over a table. A little girl started crying.
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1415 7 7
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