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Talking about a Friend Over a Cup or Two of Coffee “Their first fight was over school lunches. Free school lunches. She taught Kindergarten in a public special ed center for emotionally disturbed children. The…
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You might as well be the man on the moon. Once touching your face was quotidian. When I tallied each day's pleasures, you, in this room or that, counted too much for me, I think. I stopped record keeping. I'm …
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I don't believe in symbols
but there's a hole
in my living room window
in the shape of a bird
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After each piece cancelled the other
the generals folded up their checkerboards,
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Later I take his hand, and I lead him up the stairs. I want to show him something, I say.
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I see those shoes and the status they confer, and I know what they cost.
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the making by taking away
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lost in a taxi cab, 4:30 am
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Instead of julienning the fava beans you could, instead, slip your linen shirt off your pink shoulders and hang it on a tree branch like a white flag yelling “I don’t want to fight anymore, goddamit, this aftenoon is beautiful.”
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What you see us doing here is not so much, andall we are not being there isn't either. Our kissing mouths may not always be singing, but we are constantly praying for you, and for more rain or less rain, rivers as the situation warrants. Don't…
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When I first met Luther he was sitting on the sidewalk, his back pushed up against a vacant storefront wall, thumbing through the “help wanted” section of a few-days-old copy of our local paper and I was moved to offer him a couple of dollars for which he said,…
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Our sons do nothing but drink and roar
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A crone dressed in black pours liquid from a bottle onto the egg. Whiskey. Gasp! The egg cooks before our eyes!
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Sometimes he made us punch pillows. "Harder!" the shrink would yell.
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my foreign mouth embarrassed the teachers. my jumbled words gave people sad faces. so wrong these words of mine. even the mentally retarded girl would not talk to me. just looking at my garbled mouth made her slap herself. and my writing. oh no. my writin
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The dancer was a little chubby, but I didn't mind. It gave her more to shake.
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Confused, I paused and locked eyes with the girl who’d just bounced it with the long, dark hair. “I just saw you with it.”
She stared back at me. “Do you see it in my hands now?”
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She looked up, blinked. Fuck are you? I shook my head. Nobody you’ll remember, I said.
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Cinnamon and smoke
infuse the days that shorten,
chill, accelerate.
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Yet it was another thing to grow to become indispensable to someone without whose infirmities the helper could not exist. People in general had started to call that helpless requiring “codependency,” but to Althea that word did no good,
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We're not here for idle chit-chat, or ESPN, or fish tacos.
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In the bearded sun, I see a golden goat.
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We aren't designed for darkness. Something deep inside of us, something much older and deeper than us is telling us to move away, get to warm, because if we don’t, come winter we will die.
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Paid and laid, they leave.
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I peel off my shorts and tee-shirt, step out of my shoes, and crawl into bed. She wakes up then. "Oh, my goodness," she says.
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