1722 3 2
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Her students read their work aloud in class, haltingly, sometimes proudly, and their willingness amazed Miriam. They were immigrants and retirees, carpenters, security guards, Indian nannies, Iranian escapees. She loved their odd word choices, the lack of editorial impulse.…
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4900
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Richard played the piece again, slowly, fingers stretching for the high notes while the left hand kept the bass line moving. Then the theme, both hands hard. The notes on the score blurred, every phrase reminding him of a different melody from a long-forgotten time and…
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1372114
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The goal is to perform along with Jason Lee Norman--who is touring with his book of very short stories called Americas--a selection from my own collection called Country Without a Name. The symmetry excites me.
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194291
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She was skinny and with breasts like a wound up skein of yarn.
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143385
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Have you measured the cups, the conveyors' yield? Do you know the span? I am the LORD your God, she murmured.
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204652
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They are really living (they)
say things they don't mean
. . .
Do not know what they say
Take the path without heart,
seeing the image
. . .
The moon rises above them
It does not move their blood
Nothing calls out to their blo
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82822
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We were always blowing stale enough air into each other's faces from the smallest roundest tables available looking at each other sideways at the same sad time as the puppet show…
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112311
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Like Smart’s cat Jeoffrey,
he’s a mixture of gravity and waggery.
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180233
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He was a sushi chef, and he would spend hours in their kitchen practicing his knife skills, and the speed with which he can put that there and this in that and so on; and she would see him on the floor most mornings, still wearing that dirty, tattered ban
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5126339
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"In the camps we ate whatever garbage they gave us." This according to my mother. "We had no choice." But I had eaten pig with gusto at an anti-Semite's table. Somehow this had to be undone. Burial in soil was all I could imagine.
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182553
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Her time was spent in its usual way, breakfast, pills, organizing and cleaning. It was just hours behind today; hence the late swim. She was proud she did it, that she went outside. She swam, moved herself in the pool, chilly as it was. The pump made a wa
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154550
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"And then I, and I believe,
I alone, saw
this small child
run..."
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38514131
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138200
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“I swear that man is a force of nature.” This was her mother's way of describing her father whenever her mother came too close to the precipice. While growing up, she could never allow herself to fully acknowledge the meaning behind her mother's…
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193082
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“What are you doing after this?” I asked, faking a self confidence I didn’t truly posses at fifteen. I didn’t seem to realize that I wasn’t old enough for any of the clubs they’d go to. I’d heard that fans sometimes followed the band to an after-party.
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95221
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They left their great need
behind
when they were taken out of the country
They live without thought
of that blood
They do not respond to anything that
calls to it
They are shallow
They feed on image (alone)
Blood does not
shake their heart
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104873
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I followed the car-path tendrils/
further and further north.
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193383
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I was making good bread as a New York studio musician and jingle writer, anonymous back-room jobs.
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166163
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My poems have appeared in four different publications; three have died shortly after they ran my stuff. Coincidence, or something more sinister?
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166963
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someone left graffiti on the billboard
over: "God's a hard
act to follow"; the one that made the news
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74930
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It was in the early sixties when my mother discovered she was my father’s second wife. Four years before, they were married quickly, by a justice of the peace, because his transfer to the States had come through. He’d charmed her with his dark chocolate e
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108200
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The vibration of my cell phone on the nightstand shakes my brain awake. It always does. These are the times it bothers me most. When I am in that deep sleep. The kind of sleep you fall in, after you wake up the first time and then roll back over in the early…
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96000
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The dog catcher appeared to be trolling the neighborhood in his doggy death van.
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207264
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When the arguing started, their voices would get louder and louder, till they broke into my dreams. That night, I woke and listened in the dark for what felt like a very long time. Perhaps I should have been afraid, but I wasn't. For one thing, they never
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121000
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134500
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an island hidden in the sound holds treasure
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652400
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"I will die here." It came like a warm breeze. The first thought that entered his mind when he came to.
A low groan of pain escaped. A surrendering kind of sound one makes upon seeing their world collapse in all of its red raging glory.
Fear g
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129330
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Kiln dried mummies, landscape of once were alpacas. / Now all the wool is farmed in Alva
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162722
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It’s End of the World Karaoke at Big Daddy’s and Lara takes a photo of herself for Facebook before she goes on stage. She’s holding a basket of nachos in one hand and her phone in the other. After she takes the photo, she says, to Javier, “Hold these,” an
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168110
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That night we went out to shoot some pool at the pool hall over on Durant Avenue, which was above a bar called Kip’s. Rotten Bobby walked in with his own damn pool cue, which came broken down in two pieces. He carried it in a narrow felt-lined carrying
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