2095 5 3
|
Maybe God couldn’t find His bifocals, and that’s why my check for ten million hasn’t shown up yet. Maybe a stray dog in heaven ate my check. Maybe God went bankrupt like everyone else. Okay, so maybe at the end of life I’ll balance my checkbook.
I do
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2095199
|
I screwed my courage to the sticking point and asked him if he had shot down any Japanese airplanes. He grinned at me. “One,” he said.
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20942514
|
Did we get Jihadi John?/
And the highway to Mosul?//
What’s the score?
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20941615
|
• Don’t confuse the virtues of bananas with the virtues of banana bread
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209421
|
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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2094164
|
Somewhere along tomorrow, I will forget I have the right to do this.
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209450
|
once wedding cake
under pillows.
now fluffy frosting
on squashed defeat
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209374
|
She began guiding Penny’s arms, whispering movements through her body. Memory and experience sang through every fiber of their being. The song had become her life.
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209322
|
Most nights while in his sleep, with his one good eye deeply shut, the old man can hear the whispers of the specter in the remote wanderings, holding the surrounding woodlands in its snare. The sound of it closing in, with the bones of the universe crushing in…
|
209341
|
I think theorems and hypotheses
but all that comes out is punching and smashing
frustrated hate flows where I'd prefer to know love.
|
209254
|
Often we sit in silence and age. We are observers of dust, fashioning ourselves into antiques.
|
209200
|
Azure walked through the fog as though she were walking to class. Her hands swayed through the mist and felt the thickness of the cloud through her fingers
|
209221
|
Standing hard at the windowCold clouds move, slowBlue horizon in the distance—It's just a slice of blue.All this beautyI miss it in the bitterness.I'm consumed by the missingThe emptinessThe unfairnessAlways some unfairness cropping upand capturing joy.Glancing high…
|
2092104
|
"I sighed heavily. 'Goddamn it...' I spat under my breath. 'Every motherfucking time..."
|
209211
|
A 1960’s of walking sugar beet fields to remove the rogue bolters by hand and on other days painting the ironwork of cattle sheds with red oxide. Then a 1970’s when the self-inking explosion of tattoos on his hands and then his body began.
|
209211
|
I rummage around to see which of our many countertop appliances might do the trick. Yogurt maker? No, I need something with more muscle.
The Cuisinart--just the thing! I pick through the detachable blades—where’s the isotope shredder?
|
209283
|
When you last produced writing on a manual typewriter, was it before or after your first sexual experience, or maybe during? Manual or otherwise. Which do you recall with more enthusiasm...
|
20911013
|
pluck me from the charred grate
|
209173
|
My favorite was a red bowler, a man's hat, which I never dared wear outside my tiny bedroom. My three brothers wanted it too much to take that kind of a risk. They'd poke me with various sharp objects: the serrated edge of the bread knife, the rusted TV
|
209153
|
A strange and unexpected shift has occurred.
|
20912315
|
proving little more/
than the player’s keyboard dexterity.
|
2091117
|
He was her summer fling, the first cock to crow when the sun rose over her tequila smile.
|
20912310
|
An Ayurvedic astrologer tells her that she is a child of India. Is a girl born in Indiana a mistake of just two letters on a Scrabble board?
|
2090198
|
You would think when a bowl hits a tree the sound would be fierce, a loud clatter as stoneware explodes on birch bark dispersing shards in daffodils and grape muscari, but the noise is gentle, a thudding clink like empty bourbon bottles rattling hollow in…
|
2090247
|
I watched as the light fled
from your eyes,
No slowly dimming lamp,
|
209011
|
“They picked me up in their spaceship about noon,” Austin Grantham says to me while pulling up an apple crate to use as a stool.
|
209094
|
And I watched,
from her warm bed,
the curtains dancing
in the window
|
2090157
|
the boredom inherent in living in the suburbs
|
20901714
|
When you move to the music of a woman
|
209050
|
Besides, that might have been the area of his birth, and if so, Jacob was now the director, priest, pallbearer, driver, and custodian of a hometown funeral
|
