2397 14 8
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hunting after dark,/
in the quiet they seemed to appear/ with every new poem I read, each new workshop, some hunting carried on/ by both animals.
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239730
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They always referred to her as the possum woman back home. She scoured the streets just as the sun fell into deep slumber behind the sentinel, sun tanned shoulders of the mountains encircling small town anywhere.
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239740
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Why am I attracted to this girl?
She’s beautiful. Only five foot four, but still looks skyscraper tall thanks to those skinny greyhound legs of hers. She told me she used to dance, then giggled and said she hadn’t since she was five years old.
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23962115
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In the dread / of night, navigate by the sliver moon
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23964111
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He drove down there in his truck the second time. Didn't want to get anywhere near that snooty car of hers.
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239641
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There’s an oak tree in Hanover, New Hampshire. Twenty years old, it is still a sapling. I imagine that one day the tree will have a commanding view of the Connecticut River and Norwich, Vermont, where my mom sat in bed, crying, watching everything unfol
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2395149
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(I woke once from a bad dream to throw them from the drawer, but my hands were so clammy, the coins stuck to my hand! I had to scrape them off my palm on the edge of the table.)
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239500
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Tina saw a tear escape from beneath the frame of the man’s broken glasses. It followed the contour of his cheek until it quivered along his jaw line.
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2395115
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“This is not turning out to be a wholesome project,” my brother hissed into the phone one night.
“Yo, Alan, it’s ELVIS. It’s American gothic, and the child needs to know the underbelly of the myth,” I hissed back.“Did you, or did you not, wear makeup to
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239586
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It was my grandmother's idea of a joke, but I never realized she was joking when she repeated it every Thanksgiving. She would sit at the head table just before Uncle Leon would carve the bird and ask, "It's an American holiday. Shouldn't we be roasting an eagle…
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2395106
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It was fun, until he started winning every time.
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239453
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He blew out the candle. There was the tang of candle smoke, scattered by a sudden rush of wings, and the immediacy of another breathing thing in the dark. I heard the birdcage open, and the bird fluttering in there without crying out.
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239460
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239394
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I was a gangly 11 years old, a year before the Watergate hearings pre-empted the afternoon cartoons on television, when I discovered an uncle's girlie magazine during routine reconnaissance of my grandmother's hall closet.
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239330
|
By my calculations, all hell is uncoiling. At the moment, this fact is not really obvious to anyone, but I'm confident that will change soon enough.
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2392127
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She is unsure if it will work, despite all her reading of physics and flying carpets and propeller planes. The practicalities of aerodynamics in application remain to be tested.
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239275
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You worry that the mullahs suspect us, but that cannot be. We never touch in public. You weep and I shake when a neighbor knocks on the door.
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239261
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"My god," Toni said, bending over and tapping her head gently against the counter in fake anguish. "His ass in those jeans. Jesus. I should be young and lucky like you." Toni tapped her cigarette ash into the coin tray.
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239220
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Robert was not in any sort of metaphysical or spiritual sense seeing himself, as in the scales falling from his eyes and seeing himself as he was. He was a long way from that kind of insight. He was literally seeing another himself.
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23911813
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"You know, there really is a death of the heart."
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239143
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I was nine when I saw my first dead body.
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239077
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The suspended heart became an oracle of sorts. Hung from a string, immersed in the kind of glass container in which tulips grow, it was located between Bath and Body Works and Kleinfelter's Jewelers at the north entrance of the mall. Someone had lost it,
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239000
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Simon never looked ethereal. I’d expect someone who grew up seeing ghosts to dress in black every day. I’d expect him to be gaunt and to chain-smoke foreign cigarettes, Gauloises maybe. The kind wrapped in black paper. Strong. Two puffs and you’ve got thr
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239096
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I realized something must be terribly wrong.
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23902419
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Now when she speaks to him, he no longer responds with an interrogative but rather a cheery, "You're absolutely right, dear" or "I'll get right on it," or "What a great idea!"
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2390157
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Now he took his guitar in hand, and at once he felt a strange fiery sensation rise from the soles of his feet, to the palms of his hands, to the tips of his fingers: the Duende. It was that mystical force poets can sense, and no philosopher can explain.
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239073
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We walk in silence. We water our plants. We don’t eat as well as we should. We try to love. We try to forget.
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23891410
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I can never tell if he’s drunk or using some sort of substance or if perhaps his brain just doesn’t fire at the pace that we have come to accept as normal.
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238956
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The lizard is like wearing wings on my back, makes me fly like a dragon in my dreams, which I have all day long, while looking at you, talking to you, right now, having dreams in some part of my head. I'd like to stick out my tongue and lick the part of m
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2389189
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Jesus will walk on the water.
Judas will walk on a technicality.
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