1950 4 2
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Why do men become explorers? he asked. Because they want to cannibalize the unknown; to leave the chemicals, the furniture (and, yes, the shrew) behind; to make their way hi ho into the brush, whose weeds and lianas remain empty of the exhortations of Jesus Christ, whose…
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188522
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In principle, Sergeant Brock Lumley resisted superstition, but if you were to stop him on any given day he was patrolling Baghdad streets with his rifle squad and ask him to open the front left ammo pouch on his flak vest, he’d get this look on his face..
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292231
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Lying there, with the terrible screech emanating from his chest, blaring from his open mouth, he thinks about jet planes and jack hammers and nuclear explosions. He doesn't have quiet thoughts.
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127100
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Sam tapped the stick against the small mountain of trash bags, a dull thud predictably followed by a dozen rats scurrying out of the mass. He's started to make a personal game of it — seeing how many he can kill with one whack; if he swings hard enough, and in…
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149121
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She’s always had one foot on a pedestal and the other in a gutter.
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175184
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When Roger was small his two favorite toys were a tiny, squat doll called Care and a rubber millipede.
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206611
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It broke through the surface of the suburban world and shattered it into pieces, fragments of dreams and amazement. She was not the same as she had been a moment before. It was an epiphany she couldn't put her finger on.
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151042
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I give you the rattle of the rattlesnake. I give you a daub of creosote. I give you the metaphysics of glue.
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199100
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It’s confusing enough to grow up in a place like America, a country without definitive culture, except for ranch dressing and reality TV, but it’s even worse to grow up half one thing, half another, christened a hyphenation of names without connection to
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166633
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eleven o'clock spills
despair all over
our bedspread
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2110108
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hooves moon dark latch eyes rope / Bess the landlord's daughter, the landlord's blackeyed daughter / gun breasts dress shame shouts blood blood blood
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126464
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We believe in our love storyin spite of the ferocious efforts ofserial bankerseverywhere to discourage us from looking our damned nearprettiest if we really feel like it. I meangranted they do do their ugly troll dogimpressions of…
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39995229
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If you consider yourself neither little nor big, remember that anything large, colossal, macroscopic, ample, sizable, blown-up, bulky, mighty was once small, lesser, minute, tiny, dinky, gnomish, weeny or lilliputian.
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167997
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I remember meeting you many years later.
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22411510
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...skinny love, skinned and thinned weak broth love...
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129300
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Antique pens better allow an old soul to express what needs expressing.
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124821
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We woke up and we were whirlpools of spilt turquoise oil / with wings for flying
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182984
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He was ready for the rub. Tense. She could always tell. The legs, the shuffles. He had to be frantic before he would come to her, his own wife. Vanity, fright. She could read him like a book open on the table, turn his pages the way a fish flakes. "It's comfort night,…
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190010
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He was the tall, whippy type. Dangerous.
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103431
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If it had a surface, he painted it purple. If it didn’t have a surface, he painted it purple.
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140942
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there is a tunnel / between your skin and the ground / for kisses to crawl
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231573
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Smoke is pouring outta my ears! (And outta my mouth and nostrils, but that's normal.) The Fast-o-matic Supermart has changed their coupons. Now you can't swap them for plastic surgery. So all those tubes of New Orleans-style Cottil-i-Lard dog sausage…
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163176
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Regime is elected officials ignoring constituents, ignoring protestors, ignoring history
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1115114
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There is no need to worry about art. Art in its ideal forms stays safe. Real art resists being the object of attention. It directs your gaze, and it swings in you forever.
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1797112
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I watched you knee deep in water with a little boy you were hitting.
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33043623
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I am everything she wanted me to be. I am crossed legs, chest out; I am wearing a soft white dress—lacy and completely inappropriate to the Midwest, to 2011, to anything about my existence.
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138154
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On the beaches in the summer the fine hair rose up from under the material of your bikini and swirled around your deep navel, almost invisible to the naked eye, but not to the mind, which imagines everything funneling down into the center of your being,
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22052312
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You, the correct Other, the one I am looking for, you have exacting standards concerning where things must go.
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29793224
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sorry I didn't inform you
(missing cap)
about my trip to Spain,
(comma splice)
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168364
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Here are some ideas for stories I have had. 1. A captain of a whaling ship loses his leg to a whale, and makes it is life's mission to find this beast and kill it, and make a pair of boots, belt, and wallet out of its skin. 2. Ten people are invited to stay the weekend at a…
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