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Trunks of plane trees with parchment bark, their shaggy pillars bear a canopy of green like a great tent spread over the square of the park. Cool misting lawn sprinklers, their umbral spay--brick walks glisten in the mottled light. Fading blooms of rhodo
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22511412
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I interviewed in an hour and didn’t have an umbrella, so I ducked inside the next door I passed. It didn’t matter what they sold, I wasn’t there to make a purchase.
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225077
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Hold your breathThe smoke here is thick, I knowIce underfoot, let it burn, let it go, but don't ask me to take your handYou have never been so patient as to sit and waiteven for the sun to riseWatch, now, here it comescresting over the hill as one large eyeboiling the…
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225030
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I’m sick of you headless muffuckas
searching for a facelift.
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22501511
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225020
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. . . not if I have anything to do with it.
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224920
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Until millennia have passed and the world is dug up
For future historians to ponder
And through their meticulous disassembling of dirt
They will find my book.
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22481613
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224882
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I am running for only one thing now. For Katy.
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224831
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The crackling inferno sweeps across the ground
Devouring all in its scorching path
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2248810
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I find driftwood, long, smooth logs washed up on the beach, drag them to dunes still wet from the sea...
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224895
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For two days, I bashed out words with grimacing fingers, wrenching images from my whining consciousness – a weak, lumbering, uninspired piece – and now for what?
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224877
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...I had a string of Sunday School medals that knighted me a warrior for Jesus Christ of Nazareth...
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224742
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It scraped at Paul’s brain like a cat’s claw at the door. He hadn’t heard the song in years. Was that the Searchers? The Seekers?
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224677
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One of the pieces, I noticed, had the real shape of a miniature chicken, its mohawk, pin legs, and small definition of wing. “Look at that,” I said to my friend. And just then, the wing twitched.
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224664
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I find my mother’s pink Pyrex mixing bowl at the antique store on Fairview Avenue. It’s in the hands of a fat woman in a blue down parka, and she’s holding it upside down, squinting at the sticker on the bottom.
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224623
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My father's hands were huge. His left knuckles gashed as a kid when he rode his bike too close to a moving train. When his fingers fisted around a glass, the scarred joints bulged from his grip like blind eyes.
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2246118
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Our next door neighbor is in love with his cat. His wife sits in our kitchen crying her eyes out.
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224695
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We'd both done well to avoid crying before today and I couldn't stand to see him like this. I crawled on my hands and knees to the closet. “David, come out of there. I…I don't like this any more than you do. But you can't come to college with me.
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224586
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My natural blonde hair is no longer sultry. Instead of a Dietrich look, I now assume a dead on impression of Bette Davis in "What Ever Happened to Baby Jane" some mornings.
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22452719
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“There’s an ill energy that emanates
from your precise heart that I find attractive”
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2245159
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She's always sitting in a soft chair watching television with little stars dotting her elbows and lightning bolts on her wrists.
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22442116
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Highway 45N cost me four dogs when I was growing up. Actually, having our backyard abut the highway was the real problem. It got to be where I was afraid to get too attached. We lost Nicky,…
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22441513
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Sixteen years married, and now she wants a wedding ring. He brings her a box of Cracker Jack. She doesn’t think it is funny.
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224452
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When she awoke in her yard, she poured what was left of the rum into the dead grass. The man beside her lay with fingers curled, a claw she’d found wedged up her skirt when she woke. Tom, she said, his name nonsense, tongues. Might as well have been any
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22442017
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My glasses fog up every time I go to collect her from the pool. I'll never get used to glasses. When my sight got suddenly worse the day she was born, I didn't tell anyone. As she turned from baby to child, my love for her grew, and my world got smaller,
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224396
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Six kinds of crazy, he said. That told me everything. It told me enough.
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224363
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It wasn't until later that I realized that any time a teacher complimented you on your use of imagination, it was because they didn't know what else to make of whatever you'd created. My homemade narrative video in lieu of the assigned “getting to know y
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22423515
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No jobs except drinking...
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224273
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My daddy made all these gold records on the walls, died, and left me to run BadSmack Media, even if I could only manage to run it aground.
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