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In the small towns of central and southern Illinois there lives a very indecent sort of man.
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square mannequin-wives who can’t look in their eyes
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On the ridge in front of them, appeared a creature, neither man had ever seen before, standing taller than their horses, the strange beast walked on two powerful legs...
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I will admit it. // I cannot write poetry / to save my life—
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Once upon a time I sat in summer chairs beside cool vine walls. This was in a borough east of the major city, where families gathered in seasonal joy, by blooms fragrant, to worship the summer and its might. There is nothing diminutive about the world when one is…
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we ran that afternoon/across Bayshore lanes/into green blooming fields, beyond all those
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My story begins where so many have ended, strapped fast to a cold table, just moments from a lobotomy needle and anything resembling the man that I am.
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Years ago when the smart of it was as nippy as this one.
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As the 5 train gained momentum away from Fulton Street, Helen took her seat with the alertness and suspicion of someone who had spent the day negotiating prices with dirty fishmongers.
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Hands and fingers feeling down
Cross the boundaries I laid
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when you betrayed the vain ambition of my death,/I did not complain.
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He stood sopping in front of the mirror, dripping onto the limp puddle of clothing on the floor. He needed a haircut. He needed a shave. He needed to get rid of the two-fucking-inch white hair inside the helix of his right ear. He plucked it—and all the h
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But that last night in Europe, getting ready to fly out of Amsterdam back to the States, I heard this Phil Collins song, “In the Air Tonight,” which expressed some of the turmoil and confusion and whole-life hysteria I was feeling inside. Waves of fru
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Johnny K. didn't much like taking his exotic drugs any more. He now thought that the common reality was already an intense enough trip without wrapping it all up in enough gauze to cause permanent daydreams to the head. He liked his cheap hamburgers…
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“He didn’t finish ‘The Witchcraft of Salem Village,’” Scooter says, tattling on his little brother. I’m projecting him to be a first-round draft pick by the National Security Agency in about ten years.
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It had been over three months since he’d left his home and started to walk. He’d kept a journal to begin with, but his book soon ran out of batteries. It was that sort of thing that had irked Neil at the start, but now he’d just let it slide down his back
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Unless they leave you comatose,/
it’s the disasters you remember.
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How many exceptional people/
does it take to change a light bulb?
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Cliffs are not all I've known, but I've seen them every day since I came to light. When I first broke out of the shell that protected me from feet and poisons, I pushed my way into darkness. It was soil. I could not have survived if it was light, and when I surfaced there…
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They put me in charge of developing a drug that stifles fear.
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I am experience and information//
at a small but irredeemable remove.
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I gave my trumpet case to a girl named Sophie; she liked the velvet inside.She still played with dolls;they would live there,in the dark away from the world.Safe. I was a terrible trumpeter;i missed the high notes in band, squawked like a chicken.I strapped the trumpeton my…
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The woman leapt from the top of the burning building. The flames reddened the faces of the watching crowd. The heat pushed them back. The woman hit the ground. The crowd oooooed. If only I'd been a firewoman, I thought, with a ladder as tall as a building and a…
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He stopped believing in God when he learned how balls worked. Spermatocytes turned into spermatids and spermatids turned into spermatozoa, the transition taking place in tiny loop de loops called the seminiferous tubules which contain at least three…
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A friend of mine died and went to heaven. At least I thought he went to heaven. I mean Freddie wasn’t such a bad guy and if he had any faults they were mild peculiarities. Like his girl watching. He was a champion girl watcher. Even in this a
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Now I hear a woman's voice. It sounds familiar, like I know her, but in my daze it is slightly distorted, like I am underwater and she is calling to me beneath the waves. She tells me not to be afraid. Her words are calming; they soothe away the panic and confusion. I…
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Once in a while I have the time of my life /
in this god-forsaken Earth:
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The face had become a chilling death mask.
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try to keep him from eating the children
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She’d reached me after running through the directory, alphabetically. Apparently no one in the a’s or b’s or c’s before me would talk to her.
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