2017 14 6
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"Are you all right?" I ask. He blinks. He sits up. I help him stand. He looks sorrowfully at his coffee cup, which is on the floor.
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2017 10 4
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Let's fuck like 20-year-olds, darlingwrap ourselves around each otherand fuck our way to the starsLet's cross that line between you and meand the stuff people pay to seeI know pleasure and it is thisall over me, you, covering,…
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2016 6 7
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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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2016 17 14
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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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2016 14 10
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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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2016 12 8
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Cousin Rudy pulled up a cod /
out of season /
we were rigged for haddock, /
it was dressed for the weather
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2015 18 7
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the heat and energy it takes
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2015 2 1
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If the photographs made sounds, they would rumble like static from an impending thunderstorm, pressed between the pages of a yellowing dictionary. Compressed sound, searching for the proper words.
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2015 0 0
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She did not know what it would feel like, how it would happen … but she knew it would be done. She knew that it would be magical, like nothing she could see or hear through the cornfields or around the markets.
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2015 14 5
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And on nights like those I conjure Martha's childhood, a little girl who could make the whole world fall in love with her, with those goddam big seashell eyes, enticing adults to fall into a blue-green sea that never ends, never promises survival.
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2014 15 7
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A retired feminist literary agent named Jackie and her boyfriend, Jock, were on board. Jock was kind as one might expect of a man traveling with a feminist, and Jackie was happy yet stern. She mentored me one day over lunch.
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2014 23 18
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Five girls wobble into the train car. Their blistered feet protrude from the bedazzled straps of their sandals. Conductor: “Girls in the back with the open containers, you can't have those on the train.” A heavy-set girl in a belted yellow mini-dress…
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2014 9 2
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It's not that you want to be silkworm all your life. That's what I'm telling my on-again-off-again girlfriend aboard the plane. Her name is Phoebe as in that song about a girl who lived in her own world within the shell of another. Phoebe, I'm saying, to bridge distances…
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2014 5 5
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The story will starve. It will crawl up your throat to get the cracker.
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2014 3 2
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Six months ago, Gary hired a goateed designer to "defoliate" the office, trucking out all the ficus trees and spanish moss to make room for curved sheets of fiberglass and, as he called it, "negative space." Now, her voice echoes off the concrete floors.
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2014 7 6
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"You know what a hobo is, my young friend? Or a tramp? Or a bum? Well, I'll tell ya, 'cuz you'll meet all of 'em in yer life and it's a good thing to know since they are each one of 'em different and the difference is this. Bums sit around and loaf. T
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2013 7 3
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Ancient erections loom aloft
ringed by decades
centuries for some
in gnarled scabs of pine.
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2013 14 9
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for the rush of longing
and brush with flight
that is her imagination
will surely lift her above the traffic
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2013 8 1
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She is thinking about her baby, the one she loved for exactly one month before she lost her forever. Now, all the love for her baby is coiled in the pit of her stomach and it has fangs and venom, and it is leaking into her blood, her bones.
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2013 19 13
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old men with crispy sunburnt ears
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2013 11 5
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You aren’t easy to explain, you Americans.
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2013 11 7
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Your specific request that I never submit to you again; ever, is cause for puzzlement, yet strangely motivating.
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2013 0 0
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Pussy’s eyes narrowed, her dark, luxurious fur quivering on her back. “How can you say such a thing! It’s not true.”
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2013 14 6
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The winter following their son's death, Mr. Kelly's wife became absorbed by the tracks that ran in back of their house. At any given hour in the night, he'd hear her in the next room, their son's old room where she now slept, shuffling through dresser drawers. He…
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2012 35 14
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We were destined by chemistry and plastic figurines to give it a go.
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2012 2 1
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The barista with the fake rainbow nails and amazing cleft. . . .
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2012 17 15
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Sometimes he made us punch pillows. "Harder!" the shrink would yell.
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2012 19 9
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that day is my barking up and leaves falling down story, but in their elephant slowness it seemed no more than the regular run of the sun slightly disappearing here, and then maybe reappearing there, like a lost color, way over the horizon, or the…
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2012 19 8
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It lies in rusting riot
of shadowed days.
Flying high its emblem wings,
forever stalled.
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2012 16 14
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There are simply no more words around me quite full enough yet to sort of cancel outthese more than emptied ones. I'm sorry. There might be some forever fields left ofcrowded purple flowers if you look hard enough but no mountain's majestyto…
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