2594 12 9
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One rainy day I walked to an out-of-the-way section of town where the buildings were old, and the streets were cobblestone.
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25931211
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I was having festive sex flashbacks and wasn't thinking sharply.
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25933019
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He’s hooked on the pinball / excitements of adolescence
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25935727
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She sits at home, on the floor of the kitchen, bathing her stuffed animals in molasses to match the ones on the news.
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259351
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'That November I washed
my hair with rabbit's blood -"
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25931511
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The sky was an over-bleached sheet, stretched to the point of ripping. Everything worn but clean. He was saying he'd be happier if we lived in Canada. The sun seemed very close, like a star at the top of a Christmas tree. Maybe I could pull it down. Our baby had…
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259396
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In the evidence of broad daylight, in the secrecy of darkness, in drizzling rain that teased the embers, Annabelle worked hard.
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259253
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That was the first time I went over the wall. No bird opened its mouth to chirp. No wind blew. I staggered a little on the stony edge.
And dropped down. I changed in a cafe. Shaved. Emerged as that rare thing: a new man. My clothes were old, saved for
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2592366
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I do not trust Shay anymore.
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2592197
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"The truth isn't always beauty, but the hunger for it is.'--Nadine Gordimer Other things do matter just as much of course. Of course they do. Hey I'm still kind of alive inside this poem here. At least I'd like to think so, so yes another…
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25922013
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"For God's sake," my mother said. "There could be anthrax in the candy."
My mother worried about me going out on Halloween.
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259132
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We are the generation who tattoo our stories on our bodies, who pierce what appears impenetrable; we fly our scars like pennants.
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259021
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“He had emerged from slavery, -- not the worst slavery in the world, not a slavery that made all life unbearable, rather a slavery that had here and there something of kindliness, fidelity, and happiness, -- but withal slavery, which, so far a human aspiration…
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259072
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Once upon a time, a young writer decided to leave his home in Iowa City, and seek wisdom in the East.
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2587125
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“How much is stuff worth? Stuff man! Bling! Cargo! STUFF! What's it worth to you? It ain't worth a shit, man! Clean clothes! Comfortable shoes! A ride! Those things are important! But they’re only stuff.
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25873513
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She walks through the house she’d bought. The filth and the stench of mould nearly make her retch. Dead fleas line the windowsills, the dressers, the floors.
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258698
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I'm afraid to find out what my spirit animal is
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25862217
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I stare, out a dirty window, / into the sanitary blackness.
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258594
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I hate walking into restaurants and cafes by myself to meet someone. I always feel awkward, as if no one will claim me. I'm hanging on the threshold now for an agonizing few moments scanning the room until I see my friend.“Hi!” she says, waving her cup at…
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2584179
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I have been mother
to a hundred soldiers,
holding their hands
barely knowing
their names
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2584143
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He hunched low and forward on his bike, his 14-year old self, flying down the dusty back roads of this Great Midwestern Land, his head full of the smell of the algebraic girl he sat behind in math class just hours ago.
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25832118
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One day a woman, one of several translators at Ellis Island, asks him why he has changed a passenger’s name from Checzowicz to something else.
“The name was too long,” he says. “Ten letters.”
She replies, “But you didn’t change O’Shaughnessy, and it has
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25831413
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The patient people who work with the insane are not my kind of people. They are too entertained by the oddness of the inmates and act with a superior sense. I, on the other hand, am odd myself, searching for adherents to my view. The inmates knew me as such and agreed…
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2583149
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You can't always get what you want, and fortunately, that's sometimes a good thing.
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258254
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O’Malley imagined the blissful, narcotic innocence of Toby’s world where soft-shell crabs crawled into people’s mouths and hummed a happy tune as they were chewed and swallowed.
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25814121
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My eyes became purple, and boys called them "picture windows". Well, not boys, exactly, but one girl did. Junie.
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258084
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I'm Icarus in Brueghel's painting. My wings as it turned out were made of wax. Mothers, tell your daughters this truth. You cannot fly so close to the sun.
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258022
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It's the way an earnest five-year-old boy pronounces every single letter as he whispers. Something about octopuses, something else about peas.
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257993
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She's standing outside the 7-11, skirt up round her ass. Ripe. She could be a whore but she looks way too classy. Plus she has a huge soda - I'd guess diet - and a Twinkie.
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257899
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Matilda went wild at sixty-five. Legs left unshaven for the first time in fifty years, hair still and proud, knotted with forgetting. She’d roam the streets at night, a traveler without design. Matilda was a gardener of sorts, digging up all previous assu
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