1119 0 0
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"Here's the bad news: you have to wear a patch over your eye for the next six weeks."
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111922
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A speech that could not have been anything but earnestly prepared, sweated out under a hot light bulb while june bugs thumped against screens, delivered to fellow graduates, relatives, a state senator, the high school principle, and faculty representatives, all seated …
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111911
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111921
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A man alone in his paid-for living room, with his hands folded behind his head.
A man running from a bar, a bald man seen from behind.
Someone who made a wide circle to avoid your laughter.
A man undressing at the side of the road saying: “How y
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111990
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111900
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111897
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there was no mess she couldn’t manage, / no chaos she couldn’t tame.
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111811
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You fall with your eyes closed because otherwise you wouldn't dare.
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111820
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Dancing at the pavilion leads to sex. A nectar builds up around the heart (damp curl of hair at the neck.) The heart does not know what it cannot have. It is dumb and does not know. But I, for one, hope that it never learns and becomes numb.
There i
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111840
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I've been a fan of hagiography—the lives of the saints—since first grade when Claude Dunham and I were asked to represent St. Stephen and St. Sebastian, two martyrs of the early church, in a tableau vivant of bored boys.
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111800
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The end, she thought, when did we end? She knew it had to end. Ten months in and it was no different from the day they met. Then again, the day they met it seemed as if they’d known each other ten years. That was the nature of their relationship she
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111888
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Pity would have been appropriate. Yet, townsfolk whispered behind his back. Shouldn't he do something about it. So lazy. A gluttonous swine. Hadn't his mother kept him too long at tit, breastfeeding ‘til four? Look. Look at him now. A fat man. Our enormou
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111834
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Estonia wore a liver milagro charm on a thin piece of rawhide around her neck and slept with her teeth in a jar. She was dreaming as she often did of the four children she conceived in Mexico. They had been born in bright colors and dust. Her first child Nina…
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111866
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You had autumn in your hair
I liked the way you sat at a table
And drank champagne
My past years have carried me
To sixteen countries
Christ, we have so much to share
Listen, I know how the other half lives
And we can’t live like that an
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111833
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At the Rest Home for Silence
We are teenagers
At best
I have to admit
I fell asleep on the bus
On the way to the Rest Home
For Silence
And I woke up
To the noise
Coming from the
Overfilled silence
It's the overfilled silenc
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111811
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1. Days of InnocenceFluorescent maggot men dance the flamenco.2. The Eyes of MedusaPythons and immobile pole dancers in grey body paint.3. GolgothaA drunken mechanical Christ grinds your bones to make his bread.4. Big Ape BollocksAlpha males slug it out in a cage made of…
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111862
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I smell ham and biscuits
I ain't eatin' Triscuits
No more
No more, no more
Gonna get back on my Harley
With my mutt named Bisquick Charlie
I just ain't eatin’ Triscuits
No more, no more
And I heard you know the score
Yeah, I know you
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111833
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She was trying to hold something, gathering in … lips blue/ black, saying: “I’m all right.”
I remember her telling me, over the phone one time: “It’s a baby rabbit, and he was having a picnic. He was chewing away and chewing away. I had six tomato pla
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111700
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It had been almost a week since the “last time.” That's what he had shouted at Eduardo after they had returned the boat, after they had watched the mother walk free onto the mainland, childless. The authorities had caught up with them unusually quickly,…
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111710
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I found Mathew face down, cold and ridged like a plastic doll. I had overslept because he never cried—never told me he was hungry. Rodney had to peel my arms from around my son so the paramedics could take him in a blaze of flashing red and white lights.…
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111710
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As the pastor of a small southern church, I'm often asked by our younger members about this prickly notion of global warming. They herd around me, as adolescents are prone to do, and they ask me, “Dear father, is this something that we should fear, these…
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111777
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I live in a small fishing village where small people fish and others gossip or invent bizarre methods by which to irritate each other. During our weekly power cuts I go outside and cross the street, sitting on the pharmacy steps to watch myself not be at home in the…
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111663
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Memory is unreliable, of course-/
re-coloring savored scenes-/
paler here, more saturated there-
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111632
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“You can't smoke in here, Jack,” his father said. “Your mother will kill me.” Those were the first words spoken as the pair rode in silence from Chester County. Jack pulled the unlit cigarette from his mouth and tucked it above his ear. …
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111611
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People could disappear in the Pine Barrens and never be seen again. Either by their own choice or when someone didn’t want the body found. John Dance knew that was just a part of life you had to accept and couldn’t change.
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111632
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111621
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The water quality
will give you a hint
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111697
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Antibiotic ointment didn't help. Maybe Granny medicine would.
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111660
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The silence grew louder as it grew longer.
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1116109
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