941 6 6
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Two girls, twelve years old, run down San Pedro Avenue past the market, the middle school, seven driveways, their small chests heaving. The smooth soles of their Mary Janes keep slipping on the gravel driveways. Two men in a rust-orange van bear…
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97643
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Nights this husband returned home still hungry sometimes, even for her forearms against his own
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81421
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I remember the first time you made love to me. It appears I was one of the lucky ones … it wasn’t in a car, it wasn’t in your Dad’s boat, underwater, or any other weird place you've written about. It was actually in your bedroom … in a bed!
And how
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106022
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The Inauguration Day Windstorm had blown out half the downtown lights to celebrate its twenty-first birthday. Two old friends flecked with gray snow and white hair sat on the boulders that kept the Sound from sweeping away Myrtle Edwards Park. Look at all the…
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122293
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The headlines were my source of information and contact. Four Soldiers Killed in Baghdad read one. Seven Ambushed in Fallujah. I’d read them, look for his name, and maybe clip it out. It put me there; put me in touch with him.
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13192315
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Pa grasps my fingers, odd because he's never held my hand and he's dead ten years anyway.
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1105105
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She looks for the obit, can't find. Over and over, looks. Nothing. Nothing except something touching her shoulder. Follow me. Corridors, doors, along and along, no time to notice that this last is the stage door — she was so suddenly there in the blare and…
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14361613
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The boy giggled, splashing his father and howling at the cold.
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1408127
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1258149
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It's eerie. There are no birds. My friend and I take our morning walk in a bubble of silence.
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72700
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And how the stars in your eyes exploited you. And the pollen-bearing moon shows its sex, and the years open their cards and splay them out on the table for all to see. And you come home from all the nipples of your Trojan Wars like Ulysses, and lie down
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114796
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The old lady from next door had been really quiet for the last few days.
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18393218
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“Spare change?” he asked the couple heading into the cineplex. They glanced at his brother, saw something was wrong with him, then at him, noting his dirty and disheveled state. They passed without a word, not even a head-shake.
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1617149
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She doesn't even know who wears the Adam's apple in this house.
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56221
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"When I knocked my laptop over,” he says, "four years worth of muffin crumbs shook loose on my desk. It got me thinking about those less fortunate than me.”
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111911
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After lunch it's vocal coaching: shrieking, screaming, crying Oh-my-God!-Oh-my-God!-Oh-my-God!, panting and face fanning. Next it's ‘situational training', where we pretend to be audience members on real talk shows and practice everything we've learned th
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12161310
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Why is there a heavy weight and a chain and a padlock in her woodstove? Because, she says to herself, slightly hysterically, because this is yet another thing that you must carry. Why? Because life is full of chains and padlocks and heavy weights. Hea
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87821
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Okay, I’ll admit it, the earth was shaken on the world's underside, when you left for California. And I sometimes slept on the shores of Lake Michigan and Fox River for your tremendous thousand years’ charisma. To say I cried out in pain would be lettin
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106251
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"Good, it's Link Wray again,"
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118994
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This guy struts and never walks, and while doing so he reads and sends text messages and emails from his smart phone and so never walks in a straight line.
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74710
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He leans back in the desk chair in his home office. He clicks on “Inbox” in his Gmail. He spins around in his chair. He clicks on “Inbox” again. As he spins again, he realizes how silly it is to keep clicking “Inbox” when Gmail…
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120021
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I didn’t kiss Odgeir because I fancied him, I kissed him because I knew other people fancied him.
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116022
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Her wrinkles came into focus, the sort of old woman's face photographed for coffee tables and art galleries and corporate boardrooms, for prize juries and grant selection committees, and Luc searched his formidable memory for an exact match. Over the long, tedious…
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30144138
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I had a dream the daylight needed / repainting.
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82810
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If luscious lips lusted for love lost, they wouldn't be mine.
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91600
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I know I used to say I’d rather walk on the moon with my own rapacity. And you can easily say things like that, given the luxuriance of youth. But it was a lie, if you want to know the truth. That is only so much hot balloon air, puffed up in the chest,
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22543931
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On the ground deputies comb the back roads. Border Patrol scouts from the air
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104572
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83752
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The rest is Scots,
people for whom a taste is enough
and a lyric’s as rare as a dragon
or a poet named MacDuff.
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74222
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Here is a blank space soft and white like paper extended indefinitely.
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