2498 9 4
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When I was a boy, I always wondered if Dad were black. No one in our small town looked like Dad. He had the thick features of an Arab. If he let his hair grow, it piled up in messy loafs on his head. Of course, I never asked Dad about any of this. I wasn'
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249851
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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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24973415
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The city's hung in flashlights.
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249700
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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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24961613
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I shuddered. This is how we are chosen
by strange and silent hands.
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249542
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So I walk behind Sandra’s desk and I put my radioactive tum-tum right up to her beaded dreadlocks and I tell her about the nuclear energy that is flowing through her right now. She laughs and screams at me the way I am sure her daughter does when someone
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249564
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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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249575
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This was a dream in which I didn’t know fear.
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249463
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when the devil dies he divides enough evil for everybody
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24943218
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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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24941511
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She sets the muffins aside, opens herself, nymph-like, mouth spread and gritty. She pulls the dirty edge of his gray t-shirt up so to show herself to him, spreads herself across the mattress like thin flesh oil over too much canvas....
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249451
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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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24931516
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I forget you. Upfront: that’s how this ends.
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24922413
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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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249100
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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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24901910
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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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249022
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At a good distance, he stood. Hair, gray, stringy, long as a horse’s mane. His beard, thick, unkempt. Like a caterpillar, a smile worked across his face. No, he said. It won’t be another Miami. Not another Miami.
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249021
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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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24892626
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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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248898
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bullet points about her soul
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24883526
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On Friday nights I'm not there.
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248883
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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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248766
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It distresses me that I do not write enough. I know I’ve told you before that I don’t read, and it may be super-ridiculous to tell you now that I don’t write much either, but that is the sad catastrophe I with affection refer to as my life.
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24871210
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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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24871713
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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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248632
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The dismantled moon was not cold in our hands, but warm, smooth beneath its shell as baby flesh. The musk of its damp, stringy innards filled us with sorrow.
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24861911
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Her bulldozer of a husband died five years ago.
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24852611
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...there is something quite delicious about the air between people strange to each other, something that makes my skin crackle alive with the possibility of touch...
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24841511
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24842421
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She likes his smile and Cajun accent, his earring and dangerous ink.
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