1581 14 4
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One of the women is a brassy blond, and when she takes off her coat, I almost choke on a French fry.
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158132
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Teaching never occurred to me in college. I took workshops and wrote often. Friends and classmates, meanwhile, switched from studio majors to Art Education, or from English to Certification. Not me. Teaching high-schoolers would be all wrong. Briefly, I…
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1581114
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A young woman in shorts removes her sunglasses, putting them on top of her head in order to study a little girl sitting on her father’s lap on the bus.
“I want to get me one of those,” she’s says, smiling. Dark eyes, her dark hair wet and hangin
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1581153
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They shared a lot through the years – a bus stop, acne, and first kiss stories. George was happy to be her confidant, good enough friends to help shoulder her burdens. But he wanted to push her curls back behind her ear and trace her soft cheek with his f
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158120
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I began to imagine the shadows, so rectilinear, were arcing and flowing. I saw shoulders moving, the sinewy upper shoulders of wolves running in a pack. . .
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158176
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His eyes drift over the body of every
woman who enters Starbucks, even though
he’s old enough to be their father or grandfather,
still his eyes are aware of every shape passing by,
refusing to let go, and die.
Maybe they’re speaking Polish or
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158011
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I keep my life very ordered. Order for me is security. I am sure of some things. Like the fact I work five nights a week, and sleep during the day.
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1580143
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Unfortunately, the question had a similar impact on me that a command not to have thought about rhinoceroses would have—once suggested, I could think of little else
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1580159
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“Phennias Jessup is his name. That’s his death’s head scroll, an hourglass, bats, spirals and angel’s wings on either side of the top part of the stone. "
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15802517
|
The scent of fresh cut grass./
The idiot sense of accomplishment/
mowing the lawn can bring.
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1580118
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You’re the girl that would sneak out to poetry readings instead of parties, watching fierce semi-bearded men reading their poems from hand-stapled zines.
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158021
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The punk boys are my favorite. They come with an attitude, the piercings and the chains and the baggy pants with their underwear hanging out. I’m a punk myself, I tell them. The long white hair and beard? They’re real, my friend.
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15801411
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Her husband wouldn’t let her call an exterminator. That doesn't work, he said. The real reason he said no was that he was cheap.
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1580109
|
She asks me what she should do, and I say I don't know because I'm no good at handling fragile things. She says, let's talk about you. I say I can't - phone signal, you know. She calls me anyway, twice, then leaves a message saying that she just wanted to
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1579129
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Some time ago, I began to write you letters with the idea of helping your newspaper become a more complete map of our little shared world.
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157946
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The thing that really gets you about the house is the hurricane shutters. They're up already, even though it's the end of May, because Buck's uncle is back in Rhode Island for the summer and he's prepped the house on Key Largo like Armageddon is coming.
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157962
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In the morning, Alan woke with only a half hour before he had to be at work. He pulled his clothes out of the dryer and folded them on the top of the washing machine. On the side of table he noticed, in among people’s old, stray socks, a button like one
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157910
|
I am wearing stolen socks. Not because I haven't any of my own, and not because they are an exact fit. Only because they soothe my emptiness inside.
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157921
|
If you know how, all bodies can be read like books, like poems, like scraps of song
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1579198
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A discussion at the homeless colony under the expressway overpass crossing the river:
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15782319
|
Mack’s mind held a chandelier.
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157873
|
Thank christ for feminst theory and fat good natured shrinks and tall men who stand guard over me with real guns, real bullets.
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1578177
|
After not going out for weeks, I went to a bar and met an electrical engineer, a motorcycle racer who raced in the Black Hills, a Renaissance man, in a relationship with a young married woman, and I told him about the toad.
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157835
|
The vampire donated floodlights so the children could play ballgames at night. The lights came on but the dugouts remained vacant. The vampire sat alone in the bleachers. “Sometimes I am less than the sum of my parts,” he said to the sum of his parts.
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15771412
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I have nothing in me but a raw loneliness right now. It's as if someone whirl-winded me out of the sky into the middle of the ocean in the middle of the red faced night. My fate seems immobile, sealed, doomed to a rocking nothingness, like…
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157774
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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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157743
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There is nothing so obscure it is not enhanced by talking, nothing so dull it cannot be coaxed into brilliance, nothing so deep it cannot be dug from an abyss and brought to the surface in paroxysms of red.
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157761
|
Elizabeth stood outside my door one afternoon. I greeted her from across the studio, put on some water to boil and walked to the door. I took her hand, held it to my cheek, and led her to my dining room table.
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15771817
|
One day my wife got so mad at me she raked her fingernails down my face.
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15771211
|
Everything would've been copasetic except about the time we got down there they put the turkey in the fryer..
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