1986 5 0
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once wedding cake
under pillows.
now fluffy frosting
on squashed defeat
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1985 25 5
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" Not a day goes by/ that isn't stabbed with common sorrow"--Maurice Manning Crazy's alright by me if it's a harmless plea for some little sanity, or unavoidable by birth but it just won't do for tricks. Like say I go over there right…
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1985 8 2
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My dad drove a Model A Roadster
and had a photo taken of him on a hunting trip up in Wisconsin
with one leather boot up on the running board
and a .22 caliber pistol in his hand
like Ernest Hemingway and Clark Gable rolled into one
My dad ro
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1985 8 4
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He ate husks of bone and old paper scraps with yesterday's headlines, blowing down the street like tumbleweeds now at four o'clock in the morning.He wrapped himself in an old army coat against the November winds as he tramped back and forth, back and forth, up the ten…
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1984 19 15
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Our sons do nothing but drink and roar
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1984 3 2
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...and 55 words to tell you about it.
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1984 10 8
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a mid-life crisis in 55 words
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1984 13 8
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I had been in bed for a couple of days and by this I mean sleeping for fifteen or sixteen hours at a time. I don’t think that I believed in God anymore. I no longer knew how to stay awake.
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1983 9 4
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America has given birth to many great poets--Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Muhammad Ali--but why should talented people have all the fun?
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1983 1 1
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May as well have lived two lives, he thinks: one before memory and one after. And how can you remember someone else's life? You can't. After forty years of living, he realizes that there's no way of knowing what his own eyes have witnessed.
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1983 20 10
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1982 0 0
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Soft voices in private, in the street,
city noise violence disappears
she blinks her eyelids
and I can hear the lashes
intertwine and pull clear.
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1982 24 16
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I stared out the window, the fog creeped up the Avenues like a spectator.
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1982 6 0
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“Actually, children, none of us will be having birthdays this year,” my father sighed.
“Not even me? Why?” asked Charlie.
"Son, this is what's known as a ‘one-party democracy."
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1982 10 11
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the brand we like best and buy whether it's on sale or not. Surely there is another blue cheese dressing that is sold, possibly in San Francisco and made in a Berkeley basement by hippies who scrape together all of their change twice a year and buy cheese from an ancient…
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1982 3 2
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'Yer a cool, cool glass of water baby....'
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1982 19 14
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I'm sitting here listening to Nebraska and it's / breaking my heart
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1982 8 6
|
no one else comes in my back door but you
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1982 12 7
|
I am a romantic writer, true. But what comes after the romance is what fascinates me. A lover dying is the most beautiful scene I want to write. The most beautiful scene I have yet to write.
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1981 9 9
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I'm not interested in her that way.
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1981 2 1
|
A pale face was illuminated by the street light. A voice rasped, “Charlie?”
“Do I know you?”
“It's Bill.”
The side of his little brother's thin face
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1981 20 11
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...he thought often of the rollicking waves, of being pulled under, of being weightless and senseless...
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1981 6 2
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her heart just nodded knowingly
....yes, dear
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1981 6 3
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"Hattie? What are you doing?" Bosley asked, the quaver in his voice an indication of an impending erection.
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1980 12 2
|
...a blunt thrust of a face, uncongenial in profile, and the ubiquitous green cap that says John Deere, with the yellow ideogram of a deer for graduates of our local schools.
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1980 21 14
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all paths converge on Africa/
and Eden, and the fall from animal grace
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1980 0 1
|
#1 MISCELLANEOUS NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR:
What kind of person would the author’s daughter, Gracie, become? That things didn’t look bright for her future was an understatement: Mother: alcoholic, dead at age 25 from puking her brains out; Father: m
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1980 5 5
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It seems the people of this house were a happy family – The smiling faces, the children’s enthusiasm tells me as much. I wonder what happened to them.
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1980 7 3
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Already, I can see that, whenever Harold moves, some of his soul escapes, like an accidental exhalation, like breath on powder.
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1979 5 2
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this one was abandoned... a splinter left under the skin, pushed out by protective flesh
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