1412 4 0
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A group of us from work are playing cards at a friend's house, so when my brother Jimmy calls, I take my phone into the other room. I already know what it's about, really the only reason he ever calls these days.“Look, I hate to ask,” he begins, the way he…
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1412128
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He switched off the light. His wife was breathing softly. At her bedside he told her of her friends the roses, of the pretty carnation brooch he had pinned on her silk scarf, of her coquettish hat which fitted her so well. Small, simple and bright memories the heavy night…
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141264
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The voice is back! That voice, like milk and honey, like mother, like the school nurse who bandaged my scraped knee.
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141266
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Flew a Messerschmitt.
Drove a tank over people in Poland
though not in Prague,
and claimed he was never a guard
at the death camps.
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141251
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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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141152
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[...] A crimson post-it note/ illustrates the squiggle of a resting pulse wavering/
near the broken pencil leads and whorls of/soft wood which may be classed as evidence.
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141155
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They’re young and haughty.
27’s still a long ways off.
They read about the famous,
not the dead.
Dusty dragonflies will not
land upon them,
and they are really only in love
with the dishwasher.
Now there’s a problem.
Poetry is dead,
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141163
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We were born here. At the top of the stairs underneath a painting of basset hounds playing croquet. And a hallway closet filled with lost someones. And the police, three times a week, singing nursery rhymes while walking up to our door.
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141100
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At the annual Earth Day celebration, Frieda looked up in the sky and saw a lone goose. It had caught her attention with its call, echoing off the buildings and trees.
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141121
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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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141153
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"Do you kiss all of your models?"
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141184
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These days, you seem to disappear like bread tasted and devoured
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141100
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No one would have picked me out of a crowd as the morbid one, but it was true that thoughts of easy exits floated through my consciousness regularly.
I did my research—the easy methods, painless, guaranteed methods—and felt prepared to do, well, w
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141176
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A phrase, a sentence, a stanza,/
sounds among the sums and lists/
and starts a scratched cascade/
of syllables and other approximations--
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141042
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He adopts a stance known as Part the Wild Horse’s Mane but calls it a different name--the Part the Hair of the Skanky Barmaid for a Bleachjob position.
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141021
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lucy had simply taken a kitchen knife and removed the outer layer, the layer of things people notice
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141064
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My supper consisted of no cheese
My marriage consisted of no violin
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141000
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Tombstone is a tongue of stone in the mouth of the desert. The desert is a living entity. It speaks. It speaks with a tongue of stone. It says: Tombstone.
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141044
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an almost perfectly symmetrical/
Cheshire grin of a moon tonight/
above the iced roof of the house
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141032
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Airwave candy
lyrical brandy
brass band singer.
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141075
|
From this fundamental simplicity,/
houses, cities, regions./
A nebula stretches across the grid.
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1410159
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Squeeze the Word into Flesh
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141021
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Dawn is a grey mass, what is left of the night's chill slips between my t-shirt and belly skin. Somewhere else you once wrote that being loved when you don't love in return equals rape.
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141000
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We transplant helix° splices and
shoot back to meet our former selves, zip the
scrolls, and save the world. Then you said spin
so I twisted my jumper over and
over in
endless folds like lips, like vaginas, like
seacreatures
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141095
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Do you see the hot coals of doing? The way time sizzles or wilts…eat those coals.
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141072
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If I should stumble into cheerfulness/
remind me of all the business models
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141085
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Mari thinks that's all fine and fucking dandy.
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141022
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“Gliese Base Twelve, come in. Gliese Base Twelve, this is the Harrisburg. We have a level five emergency. Requesting immediate assistance.”
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141022
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I caught a fragment of a charged argument as I passed them. The young man said, “Well, I am talking about love.” And the young woman with equal volume checkmated with, “Well, I am talking about money.” Though their lives were none of my business, this exc
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141075
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His house incubates memories. As he sleeps, they hatch.His house is neither here nor there. It occupies a space between watchfulness and insomnia. Grey birds nest on its roof.His house is a refuge from everything except himself. The floor, walls, roof are fat with him.…
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