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I came down with polio on September 15, 1953, a mild, smoky day drawing close to autumn outside of Chicago — which also happened to be the exact date of my parents' twenty-first wedding anniversary. Only six months later the Salk vaccine was already b
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1728122
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...a blunt thrust of a face, uncongenial in profile, and the ubiquitous green cap that says John Deere, with the yellow ideogram of a deer for graduates of our local schools.
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17271512
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We left behind the wedding rings on the dresser along with the other jewelry.
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172700
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Those without magic, tried to figure out what their fellow co-workers were looking at as they watched Alysia fly. Oryn lifted her head up and her mouth gaped open, her eyes twitched as the reflection of a bright light glared across her eyes.
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17261510
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Life was small. It was tiny even, so tiny it was hard to see it sometimes. Life curled up to make itself even smaller, to fit into the kinds of holes that insects crawl into to get away from bigger insects. Life was sad. Life didn't want to be an insect.
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17261911
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Her bulldozer of a husband died five years ago.
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1725144
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Rendine Philips polishes his courage and enters the fray. Not virtual reality, more reality virtuous. He feels the pull and the push. Electricity pulses resistance.
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17242824
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The locals cut stone in quarries, built elevators at the Cummins plant in Columbus, or brewed shine back in the hills between Bean Blossom and Gnaw Bone.
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1724189
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Jesus will walk on the water.
Judas will walk on a technicality.
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1724107
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Some of the notes allude to how the ineluctable modalities of the visible and audible are transformed by the experience of hanging in a transparent egg half out of a B-17 at 10 thousand feet waiting to be spattered like paint.
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172454
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Last night Grandma got her walker stuck in the snow almost up to her tits. I feel the mark of a dutiful grandson is to come to her aid. And I always do. Even though she usually gets back home at 2 00 a.m. — or maybe 3 — sometimes she's late and we worry but I…
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We sat all in a muffledlittle line up, on theconcrete lips of tomorrow'ssleepy chin, like all the world's good little children should, as the paradelimped itself slowly by, slapping itself against the young day'sexcitement like a damaged flattire, trying its…
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172461
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I'll be honest, and tell you that I am in a bad way. The weather is very hot up here, extremely so, almost hellish.
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1724238
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To be honest, I've always wanted to be black
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172252
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It was a forgettable face, to be sure. Neither ugly nor beautiful, she looked like any one of a million American women. She could have been headed anywhere, but at that moment, she wanted to go to 14-B.
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1722179
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When Ryan isn’t around, those of us who know him lament that he peaked at 17, at Disney World.
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17211412
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But if he's been photographing her for almost thirty years, there must be close to 11,000 images. During the session, they don't speak. And, after so long, words are not really necessary.
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1721158
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It is pain taking a form, Plato’s dream, born from your hands father that rejected me, giving me the color of abandonment, eyes dulled by isolation, a body deceased without life-giving touch.
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172151
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Your tongue is enlarging... wait, it’s growing hair. No, wait, it’s planarian flatworms, an earthy taste oozing down your throat. A terrible itching spreads from your solar plexus, under your skin everywhere. You know if you scratch even once, you won
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You love your wife and would never do anything to hurt her. In thirteen years of marriage you’ve never been unfaithful, never done more than glance at another woman. Until tonight. Tonight you got lucky. Oh God, how you got lucky!
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172133
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“Hey there!/
Here I am, a fucking moustache!/
I’m the biggest damn moustache/
you’ll ever see
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172054
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Valeria never whistled. Nor did she approve of people who did. One thing she had learned in her sixty-seven years was that people who whistled were crass. Butchers whistled. So did peasants.
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1719109
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I hear the slightly scratched voice of Joan Baez coming from
the record player singing about the junipers in the pale moonlight,
applause erupting like hailstone on a corrugated iron roof.
I am singing back through the bedroom wall,
wishing the
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171910
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Mark looked at the barrel. Will had filled it to within inches of the top, and that meant the water was cold enough to take away breath, cold enough to make lips turn blue. Even if it had sat all day in the sun, the bottom would be cold, but now, after
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1718147
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You know, my mother was afraid that I can no longer resist. She was absolutely right: My four sisters have all passed away before the summer shows its fruit. It was hard "said my mother”, not to see my flowers bloom. I, the calf of my mother,I came…
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If you’re not dead yet, you’ll die of something.
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A lot of people are like this--they thrive on On conflict My bartender is that way-she likes the Confrontation She wants to fight and argue and haggle And I never related to this In anyone Well, people are scared, or pretend to be Scared at the bar. Some…
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171742
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“Can you do something about that those four stanzas of three lines each at the bottom of the basement steps?” my wife asked.
"That's a villanelle I'm working on."
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17161313
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He stays a couple of yards behind me as we slog uphill. I try to diffuse the tension with a coy toss of head, slip on wet leaves. My ankle rolls and I splat noisily down. From my new angle his beard looks less stylish—bristles straggle all up his neck. He maintains…
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