1561 5 4
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The first engine arrived and a fireman heavy with gear stumbled from the side railing.
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107353
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In the neon light and barroom shadows,
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121334
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But what “is” retirement? All of the previous sections in a life are full of detailed descriptions. But “retirement” is somehow left rather vague. One would think that retirement would be the long-awaited GOAL of life. But instead we are left with the
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90253
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Communism
Capitalism
Gism or Gysm, either way
Avoid anything with an Ism
Catholicism
Botulism
Socialism
Skepticism
If its got an Ism in it
Avoid it, okay?
(Advice for our newborn daughter)
Avoidalism is okay
Though
So you c
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70563
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I dreamt I was Vermeer
For just a little while
I took this photo of a criminal
A mugshot really
And claimed I had painted it
From memories of a previous life
He looked just like a Vermeer
With the light coming in
From the side of his fac
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161744
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Rhonda looks guilty as it is, don’t you think? That hair! And the unhappiness smeared across her face like war paint after a war.
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1332103
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It performs the dialectic that intertwines real and ideal through her mounting concern about being choked to death then eaten by a very large pig.
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223573
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Christmas is here and there's work to do.
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98354
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138454
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“Sixty-seven responses!” Al Edelstein announces at the first meeting of the search committee. It has been just two weeks since Rabbi Feldman dropped dead of a heart attack and just a week since the congregation ran the ad: “Help Wanted: Orthodox Rabbi. Im
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21164
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121054
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Along with Bad Bunny
comes the reckless dancing
the ambulance chases
and the long, drawn-on faces
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126973
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life is a lucky thing, bountiful among the
drugs and flowers
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106434
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Estonia wore a liver milagro charm on a thin piece of rawhide around her neck and slept with her teeth in a jar. She was dreaming as she often did of the four children she conceived in Mexico. They had been born in bright colors and dust. Her first child Nina…
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110844
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Our Sun bites down on the eager yet pouting lips of the softly puffy looking moon, but a jealous & runny cloud interferes with this story line just long enough for a little bit of fun: a young dancing tree washes her gold and…
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145373
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Her skirt is so short, said the teenage girls to each other. I was 7 years old. I said: she looks like a slut. They laughed; I blushed. Later, the slut smiled at me. I tried to find the teenage girls but they were gone. I wanted to say: it's actually a pair of…
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106344
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There by the opposite doorway opening onto the thinly carpeted kitchen lay—well, what seemed to be all that was left of Miriam Flagellporte . . .
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103044
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She smoothed her hair with a hand that should have been the turning pages of a cheap dime-store novel. I watched her from under my eyebrows but kept my head fixed downward, pretending to pay attention to the 6 ½ narrow stiletto heeled black alligator pumps. Not easy to do,…
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131043
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No pain is private. How can it be?
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99944
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Yeah, okay, so
pigeons are the bums
of the bird world
So what are a flock
of crows working over
a wheat field while
the artist Vincent
is desperately trying to live
with his bleeding ear
or to sell at least
one painting during
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119653
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96783
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121564
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The rocks were pillows around her shorn head, the crimson stream running from her ears the only sign she had not chosen to lay down on them. Behind us, the rockface stood stoic; below us, the water lapped our feet.She held my hand in hers, giving me succor as I…
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279553
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I used to think I could see God in the clouds. Not in an indefinite expanse of clear blue, calm and crisp and quiet, desperate in its infinity, but somewhere up there, among the water vapor masses between us and eternal sky. Not in gray and grumpy nimbostratus, nor fine…
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123584
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The coal carts come and go like the seasons, never stopping.
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115754
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So, my wife got fired from her job for being three minutes late five times. But he had it in for her, the fatty boss. He was lazy and she was smart, in line for his job. And she had a workman's comp case against the hospital—she'd slipped in pudding in the cafeteria…
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2273153
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You want to know what happened to him and your curiosity is a cat pawing at the edges of your impatience as you roam aggressively around your old haunts.
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1856103
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I scowl at her through an opioid haze. "Armitage Shanks is my real name."
The clerk snickers. "You mum must have really wanted you to be pissed on from cradle to grave, eh?"
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147563
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If he had not just decapitated a chicken, he was a man I could have loved.
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142394
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The blood from my palm runs across the rocky surface of the shell. I push the knife into the crease again, searching for a weakness, the one space where the two sides will gasp and then separate. You tell me it doesn’t matter.
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