2544 3 1
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I arrived at Yaddo, the prestigious artists’ retreat, in the summer of 1941. With America’s “day that will live in infamy” several months away, my own day of infamy began the second morning of my residency.
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254354
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It's July, which, if you work in a public library, means that the Summer Reading Club is in full swing. The SRC used to be just for kids, to motivate them to read when school wasn't in session. But in recent years many libraries have expanded the program to include…
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25424426
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Del and I watched my brother toe his way to the edge of the cottonwood branch that arched over the reservoir.
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254298
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bullet points about her soul
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25411210
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1. The clouds and the shadows of the clouds. The early light, like the night undressing herself revealing pink beneath, underneath the glory and the intimacy like early love made of arms only arms fingers and…
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2541146
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Sometimes she imagined the piles of Dr. Nishad's medical waste at the end of productive day at the hospital. Stacks and heaps of connective tissue, lung matter, gristle and bone, cancerous clumps of tongue and stomach and ropes of bad muscles like wrung,
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25411911
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Her bulldozer of a husband died five years ago.
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254000
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So, dear world, whose dearness I have never truly known, I bid you adieu.
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254051
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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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253997
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I never looked at her face.
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2537149
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... a moth,
a kiss. A silence.
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253783
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I pick up a pile of postcards, but all the pictures are of bees. There are close-ups of the bees and their perfect anatomy. My favorite picture shows the bees swarming, and I am at the center, their queen.
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253664
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Roy Orbison, Roy Orbison, Roy Orbison, Roy Orbison, Roy Orbison, Roy Orbison—right now that’s all I can say.
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253651
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I remember the first time I saw her. I'd just pushed through the crowded bar and waited to place my order.
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25361713
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We were to eat just meat and to become discombobulated over vegetables and bread and not to indulge in sex with strange men—men were all strange once you got used to their distance—were Lincoln logs, poles, boulders and scrub trees.
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25352626
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Hers is the kind of crazy that can't be masked. She's worn it on her sleeves since tenth grade.
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25342013
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I love to lie when discovered. "I'm your new neighbor." "The landlord sent me." "I'm the ghost of the girl who died on the 11th floor." "I fell from the sky." I wear billowing white dresses and a wide-brimmed straw hat that throws my face into shadow. Peo
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253400
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She's a nurse, plugging leaks, postponing via triage. I'm an engineer, watching essential systems shut down as my body buys extra minutes.
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253400
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The lead man, who did not seem to be the most important or distinguished, just the one walking in line before all of the others, knocked twice on the door and opened it quickly. He stepped gingerly through the doorway and the others filed gloomily in afte
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25341516
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I forget you. Upfront: that’s how this ends.
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25341511
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25331910
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I get what you want done from me. You want the old one two sucker punch that goes straightaway through to the tenderest part of the aching heart, the one that tumbles you out of your old worn out gut wrenching way of living life for…
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25323218
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“Spare change?” he asked the couple heading into the cineplex. They glanced at his brother, saw something was wrong with him, then at him, noting his dirty and disheveled state. They passed without a word, not even a head-shake.
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253256
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The man she loved did not love her. At first she prayed to Athena for strength and steadiness. She began to knock on wood, spit on her…
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2531144
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I still walk into galleries. A shadow of my old self still walks into galleries. That old self was hungry to be wounded by the juxtaposition of color and form and texture and line and darkness and light. But I can no longer see art. I can…
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25302413
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looking space packed right in up therelike a sun bleached kite stuck in between the several bluish colorsof the sky today has its ownamazing heartbeat. I can seeit clearly from here. Oh I can feel it reverberating for miles andmiles. If I look away it…
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253075
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This was a dream in which I didn’t know fear.
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2529209
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When he turns around she has her top off and is climbing out of her skirt. "I don't like old men that much," she says. "We don't have to talk. No one will know."
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252922
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It's true that he had always been more pure than her, looking for the authentic experience, authentic food. And more adventurous. Blogging their way around the world, yes, that had been his idea . . .
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252921
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A drag queen thrown from the mechanical bull Thursday night is my fault, they say, they meaning management. And because of the ensuing brouhaha and the ambulance and the medics and a thousand flannel shirts straining for a look, I failed to pick up Jenny, my six-year-old…
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