2120 17 6
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A young man pushes a stroller filled with a sleepy child. A young woman strides alongside them, her gait leisurely. They are the first to visit the park today. The trees loom, vigilant.
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211995
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Scratch his eyes out, flashed through Edgar's head, scratch his eyes out.
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211900
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Ai noticed the red bead at the base of Tori’s neck embedded within the feather. It had the look of a ruby. She slid her hand over the bead and a tingling sensation climbed up her arm.
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211841
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Dear England,
Please send me a redheaded boy, fire-red, please. We have one girl aflame but the others are stone yellow or dark as the sea. The flames are so easy to spot from afar.
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2118128
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Love heals. Lovers know this from the start, Yet they may not know with certainty What love is. Not that it matters especially When they find the magic within the power Of unfolding lust, Of redemption, Of unmitigated joy. There's a mutual…
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21182116
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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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211822
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The difficulty of disabled parenting was predictable,
but nothing could prepare me
for having to say goodbye to my wife again
on problem #7.
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211854
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Valeria never whistled. Nor did she approve of people who did. One thing she had learned in her sixty-seven years was that people who whistled were crass. Butchers whistled. So did peasants.
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211740
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I am mightily pissed. I was, like, waiting for you last night, at the Greenhouse cafe, and you stood me up. I should have listened to my mom who always advised me not to go on blind dates, but you are so popular that I just couldn't help myself. When I ca
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21171414
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No one means to go that way, on an errand to the mall....
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21171714
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Unfinished, deeply flawed stories require the kind of handling you see in movies where a Virus That Will Doom Mankind is disposed of by scientists in hazmat suits.
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211700
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It essentially comes down to this: If you have nothing left but paper, all you can really use it for is wiping your behind if you’re in a jam.
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211720
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At first she kept repeating "I don’t know why he's doing this" as if the cops thought she was mixed up in it somehow. When they convinced her that all she needed to do was talk to her brother and tell him to give himself up, she looked hopeless.
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211773
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out here the land/speaks in Quaker silence
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211623
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In reenactments of the pressing to death of Giles Corey, Walter’s friends stacked pillows onto his chest while he defied his inquisitors.
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211611
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Ikkyu liked coming over especially at dinner. I'm a great cook and even though he no longer needed to eat himself, the idea of a sumptuous meal and a nice bottle of wine appealed to him. We'd commune about the poetry of karma flowers, seafood, and women, he in his robes and…
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21161410
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Just a little shop girl in for the summer. Working on a typewriter. Barely knowing where the keys were. That was her. She was terrible at it. He was in a suit. He looked short, and thin, but something about him was captivating. He was in his own way hands
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21162218
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he makes his way back / to the ocean, back to the popcorn, back / to the pinball machines
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21163516
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My heart beat someone up the stairwell.
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21161612
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Night's air awhirl, the sky shoots fireflies.
Sometimes, she bleeds black arrows in her dreams.
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211593
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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.
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2115911
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Someone who I know only via Facebook and a writer site we both belong to posted a picture of a 12 week old fetus in the palm of a human hand. The message was anti-abortion. You know--how can you consider killing this baby? And the picture was of a tiny, tiny…
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211540
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Sitting at an outside table at the Bassett Café
on West Broadway, I remember, in the background
always the Twin Towers behind me
in the photographs from that time
And the sparrows in New York, bolder than anywhere
working over the scrap
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21152418
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If you’re not dead yet, you’ll die of something.
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2115109
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Marcy is two years older and got her period the summer before me. She thinks she’s a professor of everything, but she’s my best friend so I don’t say she’s being stupid or that her tangerine lipstick is smeared across her front teeth.
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211466
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"Absolutely. I get better at it all the time." he confidently replies. He reminds me that it was all her idea. They were online friends when she suggested it. "She loves it." he tells me again, but I think of her sad eyes as she walked upstairs to tend to
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211377
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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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211321
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This stage of Junior’s young life was static, moving very little off-center since his graduation from high school five years ago. Treading water both professionally and emotionally never worried him. Not until after what transpired that night when Pr
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211300
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My mystery woman smiles a hidden smile through her mask, and attempts to seduce me with her eyes. She says not a word, but brings up her hand and beckons me with the classic one finger curl that says, “Come hither.” Her eyes make promises, and she turns:
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211267
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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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