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A single woman should regard every train ride as an opportunity, I once read in one of those “How to Find A Boyfriend” books. “When boarding the train, don't take the first available seat,“ the author advised. “Walk through all the cars…
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145400
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It is easy to look out on the Bowery and say, "There are the bums." Encountering one, however, even one who asks to "bum a quarter" or tells you he's "on the bum" the word "bum" slips away in one's mind...
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145464
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"...she's been seeming like she's been dreaming while awake lately..."
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145411
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When people talk about the end moments when one's life flashes before his or her eyes, they often refer to time as slowing down. I can attest to this phenomenon during my final moments, before the collision: the song playing on the radio, the squeal of tires and flash of…
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145420
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Originally published on Six Sentences:In a family of many hushed secrets, only so many years could pass before the cracks would begin to show, and usually started with the creative girls. Though her aunt had been dead for two years, Shifra knew the cracks the family…
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145452
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The manicured lawn rolls down either side of the knoll, punctuated with flat granite plaques, the occasional bouquet of cut flowers, a smattering of faded eight-inch American flags.
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145421
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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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1454139
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Those who don’t die, desire, descend. No song aloft arises from my irk. The seeing chieftain, not of sea, nor sand, nor boat, I till nightfall stammer alive, dig boneless trenches against tiding dregs and lathe, hunt, wallow, plow the hours, call in awei
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145451
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Darkness was fast approaching. I stuck out my tongue at Naya, and she reached out as if to grab…
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145410
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Bree was mean as a bag of snakes and had done laid out most of the eligible bachelors in Culloden County at one time or another to the tune that at this point no man who’d heard of her wanted much truck with her.
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145441
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When I was younger, I tried very hard to be myself, but it never worked. I'd close my eyes, wait a beat, open them and slowly bring them into focus. This is the new me, the only me. Never worked, not once. It could only last a minute or two, so I…
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145484
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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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145366
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The world has long since been bootlegged by madmen. The new invisible con men are the same as the old visible con men, hiding and lying behind their walls of lingering death. There's a weapon wielding demon hell bent on an insane vengeance crawling around…
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145352
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Don’t forget, I’ve watched the evil you’ve done to the lawn for years, not to mention the chaos you’ve made of the woodshed. Don’t you remember me showing you how to properly stack the wood?
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1453128
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His eyes are closed yet restless, as if too many thoughts loop beneath the lids.
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145397
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1453159
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They were discussing reincarnation,
what animals they would come back as.
"I'd be a vole," Cranshaw said. Is a vole
even an animal? Connie asked.
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145310
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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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145321
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I came to a field where, scattered around, were quite a few men digging holes
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145366
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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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145388
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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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145300
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Holding a bouquet of flowers wrapped in a tissue in one hand, a round shape that balances the round yellow burst of light that is her dress. While the flesh of her chest bulges forward and she balances as though in a holding pattern in flight.
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145364
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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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145332
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Artie Shaw gave Ava Gardner a reading list in preparation for their honeymoon that included The Brothers Karamazov, The Origin of the Species, Das Kapital and The Magic Mountain.
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145322
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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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145264
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The sad march goes ever on. It stretches endlessly over an eternity of painful hills, as unnatural as lumps under the skin, into the deserted broken down streets, the forgotten unprotected alleyways, always adding more and more lost children to…
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145242
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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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145220
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He had a lean build, except, remarkably, his midsection was perfectly barrel-like. As if he kept an alien lifeform in his belly, cultivated by years of Pabst and Yuengling transfusions.
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145284
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A man bows his head
and crosses his chest
before crossing the street
and the rain keeps falling
on his bare blue shirt
and on top of his head
The taxis will not stop
The light’s still red
as the man waits
for the sign of the hands
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145277
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