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I am experience and information//
at a small but irredeemable remove.
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Need not remember, the 6th of November.
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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…
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Betty had been looking for a distraction; the lawsuits were out of control. Her last nonprofit, Faith and Life Children's Organization, had run into some difficulties due to the recession and the obvious result of trying to do more with less. Why couldn't people…
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And so began my love affair with a thick, semisold substance. Sort of like Mary Van de Velde, the chubby girl who was my partner in my 6th grade polka troupe.
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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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she sees that no one has considered her needsshe feels left out, and so she strikes outon the offensive, nostrils flaringpoints her finger and makes her caseshe has been wronged, justified in her angershe will not back downthe accused one is hurtstrikes back with her own…
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I said he was cold. I said I like cold.
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The poet could not speak of himself
but only of the gradations leading toward
him and away. ~ Mark Strand
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Although it was unlikely that she would witness mobsters racing up or down Wabash Avenue with guns ablast, she paced behind the hotel's ground-floor glass eyeing traffic for fifteen or twenty minutes . . .
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we ran that afternoon/across Bayshore lanes/into green blooming fields, beyond all those
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Robbie’s wrists itched hard, the cord was sunk in so tight his hands were bordering now on blue, now purple. Too late to matter.
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. . . I wanted to put Tiffany out of her misery and mine and shove her in front of the next large vehicle hurtling down the drive-through lane . . . .
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The first indication I had of what I look like came when a man put me back on the rack, remarking that I was too pink. Over the weeks that followed, I gained a few more ideas about my appearance from the comments of people in the shop. My photographic side had been…
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1269 1 1
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On his way to his first fishing expedition in the Bay Area, the man remembered the rustle and shimmer of the willows by the muddied Jemez River in New Mexico, cold beer, the clean camaraderie of childhood friends. He walked along a path choked with greenery to the San Pablo…
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About three dozen people, the doctor told him, dwelt in the small village until there had been a dry spell—a drought the likes of which no one in the region had ever seen before. Theories abounded as to the cause of the drought as theories do: a curse by
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I planned and planned. I followed the veterinarians around and I took vials of panda tranquilizers when they were not looking, and it was often that they forgot to look. The earth kept shaking, they were hungry, and many did not know what had become of th
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Deny yourself that pleasure
For my sake; that feeling beyond measure
That you get when you finally, and with much angst,
Decide not to be a bitch, to a round of general thanks.
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1269 3 0
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After our first kiss,
a team of scientists
scrubbed away the cancer
of your lipstick.
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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…
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Somewhere in the belly of the beast
something was stirring.
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She’d picked him up at a party freshman year, calling him Danny. Until then he had always been Daniel. He’d said nothing and his name was changed.
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here’s the deal…
sorrow follows tears…
pain later for the happiness now…
is the joy something we only borrow…?
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the sour waft of a secret
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His beloved are paper-thin when he blows into the free end. Green tint from copper.
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In my mind the village of 300 souls is called Nedoweska, but I confess that that's just a dreamy nickname I had for it as a boy. For various geopolitical reasons it had since become noteworthy as a historical site, though our interest was purely personal.…
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1268 1 0
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Us kids in left field steal out bedroom windows after dark to pinch hit Lucky Strikes between first and second fingers, arc the glow of shop-lifted hot-boxed cigarettes over the chain link homerun fence sprawl on perfectly ridiculous grass passing a bottle…
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1268 6 3
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On the phone I asked my mother how she was doing.
“I’m getting old,” she said. “Going slow. But getting there. I’m ninety-four!”
My mother was always 94, when she was really 93. I remember she was 93 right after she turned 92. And 92
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