2835 3 4
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Days went by as I stood in the woods waiting for a tree to fall, and when none did, I determined the universe is cold and indifferent and that man’s only hope is to buy wood chippers.
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2834128
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Like a small meteorite, a white cloud falls. The journey seems to have been long since it cannot spring up again, its wings being exhausted. Like a scared and shivering bird, it curls into my hand. Its apparent fragility prevents me from tightening my grip. A unique…
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28331312
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What's missing from their bodies is nothing compared to what's missing in their heads. One man in particular, now almost 80. Wakes to the smell of napalm, cigarette smoke, gasoline. Is he still feverish? Will the fungus rot his foot? But he remembers he
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283112
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Maybe you could buy a Volunteer,” Carol suggested.
Ma huffed. “You know we don't have the money for that. And besides I never liked the idea of Volunteers — taking advantage of the poor like that.”
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28313019
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That spring the war still moved north but we did not go to it any longer.
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28302620
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There is a certain stage of sobriety among men who drink every night. In that stage, they are their best selves: they write novels, fix cars, care for their young. Then they change.
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2830169
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Christine comes back from the future looking tired, which is the opposite of what I expected. For some reason, I imagined the future as being invigorating. But she walks into the apartment and abandons her suitcase by the front door, collapses into a heap on the couch next…
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28291814
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28294817
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Every one of them will tell you I drank so much malt liquor I could barf up a distillery and that wouldn’t be a lie.
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282921
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“Maybe she will like Boo-Ba-Loo, the large male from America,” they said. So they shipped in Boo-Ba-Loo and put him in the pen next to Ding-a-Ling.
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28283015
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For twenty-eight years, Cochran Baines removed a tooth from the mouth of every dead child that spent time on his table.
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282843
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If I play my accordion too loudly while you're painting, you complain. You stamp about in your room under mine. You fetch the broom from the closet and use it to thump vehemently on the ceiling. I feel the vibrations through my feet.
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282721
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Poem: Zohra El Fassia by Erez Bitton
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282655
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I made this robot. Everyone was making them. Mine was a vacuum cleaner with a rubber jack-o-lantern mask taped to the handle. His name was Z-Bot2131F, but I just called him Brady, after my dead brother. Brady, my brother, had come out cold, and…
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282510
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But she knew what she would find. She knew it all the moment she felt the sticky fingerprints behind the slat of her old oak slay bed. The fingerprints that would only be left from a person grabbing it from behind their head. The fingerprints that she
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28252219
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You’re broken. Your eyes don’t see quite right, and your hands don’t feel quick enough. I love you anyway.
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282422
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They sway from his hips, the torn knapsack, and the corners of the pushcart
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282421
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But not once did we mention heaven. The next day we bought another one.
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2823138
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The clickity-click of poker chips spills out to the six of us waiting for a table. We're old college buddies, drunk since one this afternoon, sporting the ball caps our wives never let us wear. We brag. About our poker wins, how easy it is to read each other, how we can…
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2822168
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The possibility for numerous outcomes – the possibility of anything, really – lives on the writer’s page.
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28212623
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I counted telephone poles and the seconds between them. The old highway cut straight through the sand and it seemed the road would never end. No curves. No hills. Just poles.
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28211611
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Their breath stank inside my lungs and tamped down the very minute amount of remorse I had left. It was replaced with contempt. Their fear warmed my cold sensibility as I steeled myself.
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28203116
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I don’t remember the name of the boy in high school
or if I cried at his funeral
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28202521
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I found the knife in a fishing box in the closet. The box was made out of varnished wood. My father’s father had made it.
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282000
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She stood there with ladylike maturity; her eyes were frightening with an unforgiving look, visible in her tears that pierced the very core of Oryn’s heart.
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28171513
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and all the trees are holding/their limbs up in prayer/and rain is mating with soil
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281773
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28162625
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There's no surcease from heat, no "cool of the evening," like the songs say about summer in the South. Those songwriters sat under fans in the Brill Building in downtown Manhattan.
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2816114
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A young woman in shorts removes her sunglasses, putting them on top of her head in order to study a little girl sitting on her father’s lap on the bus.
“I want to get me one of those,” she’s says, smiling. Dark eyes, her dark hair wet and hangin
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281666
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It drifted into the sea, I say, when you ask me about home. You’ve only known me for a few moments, so you’re not sure how to gauge me. You laugh, and make an Annabel Lee reference. The English teach in me wants to hug you. The New Jersey in me wants
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