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In college, I made friends with my Jewish roommate. Her name was Leah and she was from Brooklyn. When she asked me home with her for Thanksgiving, she mentioned we could go to synagogue together. I asked if there would be other black people there. "No," Leah…
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Lucien Lucien Tidesquall lay almost sleeping amid the soft green grass. His eyes irradiated green midnight under vanquished brows. A plover hovered somewhere in the distance. It reminded him of a poem he had written as a teenager, a haiku that went as…
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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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All the time I'm eating I can't help but think of the many different tuna melts I have ordered in diners and coffee shops and how each of them disappointed me...
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Somebody left CNN on all night long
until the news cycle flipped, crashed
and burned
in its own ruins
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I’ve seen your tired souls
riding under the city
lost in the drowsiness
of morning calm commutes.
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He was lit up faintly.Standing in a room of golden proportions (which is not saying a lot), he was one stood man (which is). The only lamp, a seemingly old neon, hanging short from its chains, shone darkly above none. None but a five-feeted glass plane, upon which glossy…
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I imaged him at his mother's house, eating chicken and tabouli with her at her round marble table, leaning back and laughing, then reading my “love you” and excusing himself to cry in the bathroom.
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I remember a time when Calvin, my husband, was like Winnie the Pooh and I was a jar of fine Provençal honey. No amount of my sweetness could satisfy his craving for me. He would spread me on his toast with butter at breakfast and mix me with peanut butter
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We wait for a server to bring our coconut cream pie. His favorite. I hate coconut.
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destinies bring me to a damned desert
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Suddenly, the room was filled with a screaming vortex directed at a pinpoint in the corner. Timmy's bureau was gone and everything loose in the room was flying towards the spot it had occupied. Timmy stood up in horror. He tried to seal this rent by tossi
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Our ragged wits, ragged minds, after acting out all, imitating all honey-like tunes, air song, excellence of song, true flower of the world. So the sun has some of its honey wintered away, to bring it into contact with such a human voice as yours.
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The walls of our shanty were of the standard corrugated rusty metal typical of communities like ours.We did our cooking over a Bunsen burner purloined from the Catholic Boys' School - beans mostly. We did our drinking from bottles of Thunderbird or Old Crow (when…
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The musician’s wife had a roving eye. He didn't care. He liked being married to a wild and crazy woman.
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I tell him if he wants to impress a girl he should learn to cook. He shifts his body. I add, crab cakes work well.
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I remember one time that summer I was with you (1964) going to a bar in maybe it was Melrose Park, or Northlake, or somewhere along Roosevelt Road closer to Chicago, not as far as Cicero though. I went there with a crazy gear-head named Roger Hudson, wh
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This is a very impromptu piece written at two in the morning based on a prompt from Meg Pokrass, who insisted the following words be used: fussyhairybloomingslipperyflutterdamppaleweedsyanking “Maxfuss” was his password, which was appropriate,…
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Wait a minute, said Ben. What do we really know?
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Writing books is like raising children. You do your best, nurture them, discipline them, coddle them, feed them, patch up their injuries, sing to them, try to sell them, but no matter what you do, they are what they are.
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As a kid he had run away from the family farm and shoveled coal back East to put himself through college. Now he was just another old man in a nursing home, desperate for a drink, his blue eyes bleary, a sticky goo filming at the corners of his lips.
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instead of gun metal deceit, sounds of malice;be a drop of rain.
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"The rider rode his bike in Arizona just about every day and for all the usual reasons....."
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This gravity thing, I reckon, is enamored with me. It loves me so much that it has fettered me with itself.
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He slathered the glue on my scalp and talked non-stop about Harlem. Electrodes or nodes, I never asked which, would measure something inside my head. I doubt they actually did though, measure anything. I've had the pleasure of having wires glued to my skull before and have…
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Expose those for whom freedom is greed.
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Your son is six feet tall in the sixth grade. By his sophomore year of high school, he outweighs you by a hundred pounds. He's been offered four football scholarships and one for a sport he's never played. Every morning his mother, your ex ex-wife, makes his breakfast of a…
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