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Video from Cairo

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The view from the tenth floor of Ramses Hilton hotel was depressing. A restless crowd undulated between the wrecks of tanks and armored cars. JOURNALIST: Hey! I’m dying here, and you admire the views?

The Cure for Cancer

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Thus, more people can drown// and leave their bones

Be Afraid

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Everything conspires to kill you:

Arcana Magi Pure Vol.7 - c.4

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Mayumi flicked her hand, making her circle deflect the spell. She picked up speed and her hand grabbed Emi.

The Strength of Glass

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They sit across from each other and she smiles as if they were in a normal place.

A Storm A-Brewin'

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"I'm just saying," the older man continues, "We oughta be ready in case she hits." "We'll be fine," the woman says. "We've weathered every storm that's ever come through here just fine."

Hindsight

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You were a mine field

Proverbs of the Converted

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a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single ticket

(Younger Driest)

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He did not seek a place on a cabinet, nor to impress stockholders with placards of wealth and return; he did not enumerate the downtrodden and asocial with advertised miracle treatments, or write a best seller on the markings of success. All he did, all h

Hunger: A Prayer

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Prayer: Cold prayers in her throat, so far all unanswered. This thing grows steadily, unmistakably, cobbling counterfeit cells and flesh together into an unspeakable mass.

Buck, naked

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Buck, naked, has no words. The best he can manage is a dopey strangulated cough. His wife, who is clothed, stands before him, next to the waterbed that took Buck half a day to force into the trailer.

Face to Face

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The face had become a chilling death mask.

Monsters Happen

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Dee startled awake from the dream, sat up in bed and looked around the room. The dream came back--hazy, yet clearer by the second. Dee had been warning the girl in her dream that he was a monster; that she shouldn't talk to him, should stay far away from him. …

ancients

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rheumy eyes wink, gnarled hands pantomime

Reburial at sea

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“Sloshes to sloshes. Drip to drip,” I said, then ceremoniously flushed the toilet bowl, our heads bowed in reverence as Molly and I gave Swimmy its last rites. Swimmy, named by Molly whose overstatement of the obvious is endearing in a three-year-old, was…

Not Writing

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I don't look like other poets. / People hardly believe it when I say / "I write poetry, sometimes. / During lonely evenings."

Ambassador of Nowhere

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Before you tripped on the third rail, you were like any other: coat a shard of midnight-blue, eyes filled with gratitude but for nothing. You were a lost coyote on a snowy hill. With sad magnificence you wandered, terrorizing passengers who secretly wished to pat your…

Birthmark

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She sat down in the big soft chair in front of his desk. “In your religion you believe in past lives, right?” “Yes, reincarnation is a tenet of the Hindu faith.” He replied. “As Catholics, I think we believe that only Jesus had the power to come

Pavane

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The shadows hang fast on the downs this day: And I hang like the darkness, over heath and down; Since the air there is clearer than the clouds, men say, And I'm lost in the country, I shall turn to town. If the heather is restless, then the fete is …

Gabe

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“Damn!” he said to himself, wondering for the millionth time what he was doing in such a sad line of work. Break time, he decided, grabbing his stash box and locking himself into the freezing cold bathroom to smoke a joint. He emerged thirty minutes la

Pablo Picasso and Pornhub: What I Learned From Magazines This Week

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Reading magazines this week, I learned that:Sally Field dislikes gefilte fish.(Vanity Fair, 3/16)Pornhub, an explicit-video-sharing site, gets 2.4 million visitors per HOUR. (Time, 4.11.16)There are 641 million obese people in the world today. (Time,…

Waves

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“still watersrun deep” is not my portionborn to make waves Formed from the ocean

A Tangled Web of Likes

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Liking up with the Joneses...

Halfsies

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You and she might make love here, next week, and I'll buy my own razor, switch from baths to showers. I shave my legs in my imagination. They, like life, are smooth.

The New Girl

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She’s new, with the enthusiasm of a new person. And everyone wants the new girl.

It's not heavenly light, b!*&#.

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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…

If. You. Speak.

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The one at dusk is not the one you met this morning. That one's gone like a head in the window.

Caitlin's Boots

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A horn honks, brakes squeal, Chloe’s screaming, pulling at her. She’s lying on the sidewalk. Her shin hurts. Her knee. Chloe kneels beside her. Ring of kids staring. I’m good, she says. I’m good.

The Blue Jay

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His mother hated blue jays, hated them with a passion she usually reserved for no-count trash who drank beer on their front steps and worked on their cars in the street.

Butterfly Kisses

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We are driving towards New Jersey, my husband and I, to pick up our seventeen-year-old daughter who is visiting her father for the weekend. As we drive there, I am suddenly reminded of how much I used to love my ex-husband, particularly when I was sevente