161942
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We've worked silence over /
Like pros, our best work together.
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161878
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for a handful of weeks/ my father took me to/ the college of art and design/ downtown/ where i took drawing lessons./
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1618910
|
I get out of the pitstop at the reststop, wade through parking lot hiphop. Hummers with Jesus Luvs George W bumper stickers, and a subdued slow hurricane of dour obese women in powder blue and tepid brown walking about the place like zombies. And I see t
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16182610
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maggots are small minutes in the trash i saw them
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161853
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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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161872
|
I pass the Grief Benches on my way to work. No one is on them today. Last night I saw a couple there, him wet eyed and her with her head down. She scrunched her eyes tight as I passed and I remember thinking she was a fraud. It's alright if you don't want
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161785
|
When I feel the sort of longing that sneaks up on me unawares, the sort held for the wrong kind of person that can make a woman clutch her heart in the night and sullies her blood with unwanted dreams in a thinking person's landscape, I hear, too, the deep…
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1617176
|
The Boys The Boys, they call my brothers in the neighborhood, or Those Boys. The Taylor Boys. Sometimes, Mom calls them Thing One and Thing Two, like in The Cat in the Hat. Those bad boys. Nobody has brothers like my brothers, kicked off the school bus, barred…
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161610
|
I was getting ready to eat a thick peanut butter and grape jelly sandwich when a blue spider pushed up a corner of the bread from the inside and said, "Don't chomp, don't chew! We're in here, we're having a good time, and we don't feel like being eaten.
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1616204
|
It's supposed to resemble the sea bed. These fish have never seen the outside of an aquarium and even if they had, they are reef fish, they'd probably get the bends and die if they went to the bottom of the ocean where the chances of them finding a cerami
|
161593
|
|
161573
|
Like all professors, I'm required to maintain office hours to help my students so I'm at my desk every fourth Tuesday of months without an "r" in them from 10:30 to 11:00 p.m.
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1615134
|
--How's the wriiting business? How about that thing you' was workin' on..."Gawain's Green Nights?"
--Yeah, well, I'm kind of off the soft-core...
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161500
|
They tell me I’m crazy. I say I’m just keeping up.
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1615206
|
The book has known many women’s hands, something erotic and frequently checked out from our local library. Its cover depicts a man and a woman, both with improbable if not impossible bodies. I believe the term is bodice-ripper.
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161542
|
yoo evva kizza rabid atween da erz? end chee siz NO end din yoo siz yoo wanna kizza rabid atween da erz? end chee siz OK end yoo pull yoo
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161495
|
During fifth grade, I was called /
closeted queer and tall faggot.
|
161467
|
In study hall Brandon sat like a little faggot so I said “Hey faggot.”“That's right, faggot. Don't look at me. I don't like faggots looking at me. I don't want their faggot eyes on me, faggot.”Bell rang and he walked like a faggot and held his books…
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16141713
|
“You’re a hard habit to break,” I said. My tongue was flaring. Flirting with nurses was my father’s thing.
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161421
|
When I glance at the bedside clock I realize that we have been making love in one way or another for nearly three hours now. I am filled with a certain secret smugness that I am still going strong. It has been a long time since I’ve done anything quite li
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16141918
|
He was a tenth grade / messiah, famous for acts of attrition.
|
161471
|
It was a sloppy little factory town that could be beautiful, but never bothered trying. Sits on a big lake. More bars than churches, and too many of both. Racist. We hated anybody who didn’t believe in white Jesus
|
161441
|
Serbs and Croats? Hutus and Tutsis? The east coast/west coast thing in hip hop? Lou Lou and more Lou.
|
16131712
|
The Gothic-filigreed gate creaks as a guard closes it behind the little girl in the ruffled dress. Standing there in the morning fog, on the sidewalk outside the reform school, she looks remarkably like Shirley Temple. Dimpled, chubby face. Pretty, party dress. Her…
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16132215
|
A boy stalks three deer across an open field.
|
161321
|
As I was going into Wal-Mart, a man with a useless arm was coming out. I'd never seen anything like that arm—a dangle-flesh, rubbery thing with no purpose.
|
161212
|
“Choices overwhelmed us,” Thomas continued, years later, “like waves crashing.”
|
16121412
|
My mother pointed to the soaring red towers, each with 600,000 rivets, she said, put in place by men like my Pa, by their sweat and arms as hard as balcony railings.
|
16121211
|
fun fact: a doll's legs will twitch
while being scalped
but only for just a little bit
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16111913
|
memories that no longer make sense
|