1291 4 2
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Maggie leaned her forehead against the cool glass of the Greyhound bus window. Over the river and through the woods, she thought watching the snow west of Interstate 95 melt away into skinny pines and palmettos. Brunswick 2, Jacksonville 70, slid by riding a …
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129166
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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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129110
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In the United States of America children everywhere are waiting for summer vacation. To a child in the United States, there is summer vacation and then there is everything else. Summer vacation is freedom. The united states was built on the foundation that one day we will…
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129112
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1291139
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I was convinced that enemy bombers were on the way.
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129163
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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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129122
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The Third Defenestration happened during the Soviet era, by the apparatchiks. The only thing that saved the people from certain death after being thrown out of the window of the Prague Castle, was an enormous pile of horse shit below, or haufen mist, as t
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129143
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Nights this husband returned home still hungry sometimes, even for her forearms against his own
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129154
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129100
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We're at the Park Diner. My dad Tommie is sitting across from me. He looks haggard, tired. His skin is pasty and washed-out. He's not talking, so I'm not talking either, but it doesn't matter because it's hanging there between us.Cancer.Motherfucker.“Don't look so…
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129153
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The mother, a pony-tailed beauty, thinks she looks fat in her
new blue-checked pedal pushers and white blouse tied
under her full breasts— in the latest style.
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129120
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He draped the sheet over her body. Blood spotted the fabric, rose petals on snow.He left the pistol, but pocketed the first edition she'd signed. Part of his fee.In the park, he ditched the glasses, fake mustache, and anorak before making the call.The publisher called an…
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129172
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It waited and witnessed the seasons complete a grouping and form a year. Then it watched them do it again. Winter, spring, summer, fall. It watched from the inside of course. But it could see. Big sliding glass doors and long and wide windows stayed the course also, way…
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1290107
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Once you descend, the third rail/
hums its invitation
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129021
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I don't know what I'd expected from the week of mourning after my mother died but I sure hadn't pictured this marathon cocktail party. Our house is packed with people, food, booze and borrowed chairs. People I haven't seen in years keep turning up with casseroles.I'm…
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129000
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Leaving another seemingly pointless day at the office. 4:55pm. Winding through the office parking lot; turning right onto SE Convenience Blvd; inevitably pulling up to a red stoplight at the Orlabor intersection.My windshield is dirty. Speckled with thrown-up slush from…
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129076
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Beneath maples, oaks, and birches/an autumn apocalypse empties unruly brightness
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1290105
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and, under foot,//
dark caves waiting/
with their unseen pigments/
adorning forgotten walls.
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129000
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Don't slow down, he said, time grows shorter every minute.
So you pretended to stay young or cheated on your marriage or forgot to watch your children growing up, and still never found someone who could understand you.
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129021
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I remember sitting there on the first unfinished rooftop, watching you building houses out of words. You hammered in grammar and punctuation; you said these things needed to be hammered in by hand. You drove the long straight exclamation …
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129012
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I was sitting at my desk at work and couldn't figure out why it felt like a person with a very weak grip was trying to strangle me. Then, I realized I was wearing a scarf.
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129065
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He doesn't call, not even on her birthday. She doesn't mention it or complain. She knows she doesn't have it as bad as some, even in this privileged Triangle of North Carolina. She is white and pretty and belongs to what's left of the middle…
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129000
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So much of everything isn't the way I'd do it at all. I wouldn't do myself the way I've been done. Nope, the way I'm turning out is not the way I planned, definitely. I'm turning out to be a limp middle class day-after-day type of guy ... I go to work, I
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129010
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It's saying, "It feels as if you've given me your old, your tired and your poor. I feel much older than the years you've logged."
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129010
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Talking to Shakespeare by the riverside,
I am saddened by my lust for women,
how my eyes fixate on the spit that passes from top to bottom lip as they talk to me.
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129085
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He hid gallons in the garage,Fifths in the basement,Pints in toilet tanks,Airline bottles were on his person at all times.But he wasn't drinking.Why would he?He'd bought the cure at an expensive CenterThat taught him YogaAnd acupunctured away his brokenness.The cure worked,…
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129011
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I still picture her waving her bare arms and hands into the purple bellied clouds above the trees, her crooked smile, the spiraling silver maple seeds cascading soft circles around her determined reach, as though the very tree limbs shaping the sky above
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129086
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What the spaces say//
can be heard in the short/
and longer silences
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129010
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128920
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"I see flashing bright bacteria floating in the air," he replied, not bothering to think about the words. "I see puffs of smoke issuing from inappropriate objects. Fingertips. Baby carrots. Furniture... Oh, Christ," he seethed, arching again. "Get me some
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