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Beautiful Plague

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Jacob Obrecht, you are beautiful. Everything inside your head and everything you’ve ever made is beautiful and singing.

The Great Wall of Suburbia

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Old man Hensley was fed up. With everything, he would say, if one was so inclined to ask (which was not advisable). It was his first morning as an official retiree and, if it was…

Rittenhouse Square: excert from Ari Figue's Cat

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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

Frank Meets Francine

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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.

Joseph Campbell by the Aloe Vera Plants

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There was man from antiquity that sat next to me. His belief in the healing qualities of Aloe Vera so pronounced, that the house brimmed with such. He had no use for modernity in any of its forms but was fond of supermarkets. When in one he was overwhelmed with an…

Black Coffee

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“I don’t see how anybody could do it.” “I could do it. I could do it because it ought to be done. When a thing needs doing, it’s best to go on and do it.”

Sees, Kindness, and Made

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SeesWe fell into this lake together and traced the clean soft lines straight back to ourselves, with a carefree laugh, ha ha ha-- an embarrassing ease. This small miracle does tend to put in orbit something high flying besides clouds into the sky inside of…

No More Dogs

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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,…

Blue Jeans and Black Leather

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I lock the last of the beer and wine doors and head back to the cash register. Our clocks are not on bar time so I only have a few minutes. I check the till. A stack of ones and three fives. Enough to break a twenty, but looking bare. The parking lot's empty. The air…

The Thirteenth Sign

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I'm twelve again and

Hoops

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Backs in the grass, legs straight, bare feet resting at angles, Rachel and I, both of us seven, looked up through the oak limbs that made black lightning cracks across a blinding blue sky. Three hula hoops sat trapped in the trees’ sprawled grasp.

William

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The sun browbeat me relentlessly, like a one-eyed judge with an unforgiving heart.

Veld fire

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The crackling inferno sweeps across the ground Devouring all in its scorching path

Pieces

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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.

writer’s block

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round & round this empty block again & again i go

Of Cameramen and Death Squads in Tbilisi

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we share somewhat the same past he was bureau chief of ABC overseas

My Boogie Man

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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.

Accidental Faith

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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.

Story

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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?

A June Defection

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I came from the only flat region in the kingdom of mountains and fjords, and called the city “Down in the Dumps”. The beleaguering mountains smelled a flatlander when they saw one, and hated me right back.

Out of That Bed 1963

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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.

My Digital Garden

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This part of her digital garden is not impressive, slightly sloppy, even haphazard. However, her avatar is an attractive woman with good make-up.

Carmen (from The New Yorker+ a Jimmy Breslin "afterword" from Newsday)

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Every trip her mother leaves it until then: Shouldn’t she look for an apartment in a better area; shouldn’t she try for a job with some future? “And, you know, someday you could get married, Carmen.”

1918, 1944, 1991, and now

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Disability is indivisibility—all of us could be its members—unlike its affirmative action forebears who remain underrepresented, even as the groups’ selected contestants prepare to retire early, a distributed group whose specialty is American anthropology

Telling Maybelline Jones

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Maybelline Jones is my sister, my friend, and I try to tell her the right way to be.

A Manual for Readers

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The story will starve. It will crawl up your throat to get the cracker.

Ten Minutes, That's It

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They tell me I’m crazy. I say I’m just keeping up.

nudes

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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./

Threesome

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Six kinds of crazy, he said. That told me everything. It told me enough.

Something About Ireland (from FATHER MUST)

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That’s the way it went all day with me—didn’t get far, didn’t see much, just, with Mary, drank tea here and there. A fine day it was, too; not cloudy, not raining...