864 15 11
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My father taught me how to solder and that's when I first started to write. Now, when you hold the soldering iron in your hand and depress the trigger, the tip of the gun heats up. Novices uncoil the solder and place it on the hot tip, but that just results in it…
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986 13 12
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1144 8 3
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She waited on the hot, broken pavement, arm outstretched, her thumb a ticket to a distant, refracted horizon. Waves of heat danced like undulating snakes under the spell of a charmer. She pictured herself passing through them, abandoning the green of home for the…
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2362 17 8
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“You don't know what it's like, to be an old man, to be alone man, behind blue eyes,” he said to the downtown city sidewalk. The sidewalk said nothing. People with someplace to go rushed by him, not stopping.
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2082 36 6
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I do not trust Shay anymore.
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1454 12 11
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I peed on Rick’s toothbrush. I nearly repented and cleansed it with hydrogen peroxide in the middle of the night. But I didn’t.
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1286 15 11
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The universe will fuck you over in the end./
That’s what it does, what it’s good at—
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1453 12 11
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Bag worms hang in their cloudy white hammocks. This is the month of webs when long-bodied yellow and black spiders sign their autographs.
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1669 17 11
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There were only two students in the sculpture class: an 86 year-old Jewish woman and myself.
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1588 17 10
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Even if your heart is as large as a small car, your tongue as heavy as two grown men—even then—you will have to carry it with you wherever you go.
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1193 15 11
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1901 16 9
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The Strongman used to weep alone in hissingle dusty tent at night, all of uscould hear him, sobbing, thinking about theone incredible time in his mostlymiserable life he accidentallybrushed his thick arm…
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1744 19 9
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I remember the tan guinea pig, dead of dehydration. Through the wire bars of her cage I viewed her body. She lay stiff on her side, stretched out, as if in her guinea-pig dream she had been running through grassland, open and close to the sky.
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2065 28 8
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The first flight is effortless
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511 12 11
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Based on length it looked like a note, lacking the deeper illustration found in full-fledged letters, but also missing were condolences and considering the subject, such sympathies might have seemed appropriate: Dear Mr. and Mrs. Madison, Katie is
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1364 20 11
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The suite of dark rooms/
extends forever./
It’s no big deal.
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1525 14 10
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are my only real friends. They don't seem to mind my shuffling down the dirty sidewalks without acknowledging their mere scraggly presences like friendly tombstones. They are growing their hair out again. I've noticed that much. We've got a…
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1466 12 11
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Jesus came strolling
by in his sandally Jesus foot sandals.
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121 12 11
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I am Gloria, age nine, standing with my left hand on the green gate to the yard of the farmhouse that I will always consider Home
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1698 13 7
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1685 14 10
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Momma’s hands smell of vanilla.
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1432 23 11
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Mist falls from the opaque sky and splatters crystals in your hair...
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1397 15 9
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1377 13 11
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It’s been a series of bad clams
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1200 15 10
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Translation’s not required—music/
sings itself complete and comprehensible
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2103 19 10
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I get what you want done from me. You want the old one two sucker punch that goes straightaway through to the tenderest part of the aching heart, the one that tumbles you out of your old worn out gut wrenching way of living life for…
|
2317 12 8
|
you dug a hole inside my heart
and asked me if it hurt
|
1423 12 11
|
Maybe, after years of writing poems like letters, he began to notice that no one ever wrote him back.
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874 12 11
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106 18 9
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Nobody looks for Gina between the hours of four and five. Her father is on swing shift for the rest of the summer; his two o'clock- dinner plates are soaking in a sinkful of scummy water. Her mother is fanning herself in the shade of the wisteria, most of her…
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