33231817
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Sex when you’re pregnant
Is like sex when you aren’t
Pregnant, but with extra people.
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1320
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The afternoon I was born, my father brought my two older brothers and my sister to the hospital with him, but back then, they wouldn’t let children in to visit. My father and siblings all stood on the grass below my mother’s room and called up to her.
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5492
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Her baby is a furred thing, alternately bristled and then soft. She hopes it isn’t shedding, wonders how she’ll ever get all that hair out of her if it is.
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10394
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I think she wants to take skewers and pull her secrets from my head in a performance of multiple lobotomies. She will barbecue them and feed them to her husband, who won’t know what he’s eating. He will think they are mushrooms.
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3900
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Karina used to point at boys on the street and tell me if they were Puerto Rican or Dominican, like those were the only two things you could be. One time she pointed out a Puerto Rican boy and I said, “Oh, like your father, Julio.” She stopped walking
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12253
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The house is too quiet. Silence drapes around your couch, the TV, the credenza with a Virgin Mary statue. Me llamo Inez Cuevas, you say out loud. Vivo en Corpus Christi. You write it on the blank page of your notebook, and underneath it: No tengo ami
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91231
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The Campus Socialists
Paul and Mary Jo lived in an apartment at the top of a long, dark flight of stairs that were so high, I remember as if it were yesterday thinking, the night she pushed him down the stairs, he would surely be dead by the time h
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6653
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Her swell of child fits like a socket into the bowl of my hip-bones.
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1880
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All those things they said would make us sick, simple as living.
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9985
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The fantasies expand. With a small fatherless daughter I might finally become the rebel and the outcast I was always meant to be.
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101511
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Steve Bancroft’s future wife showed up at his door that same night, slamming her hand loudly against the door and shouting for him. “Steve, Steve, wake up. Damn it, come on. You forgot to pick me up at the airport. Who are you in there with? I said wa
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85600
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There was all this pomp and circumstance. We were each outfitted with robes, red of course, and mortar-boards with a gold tassel dangling over one eye. It made me positively dizzy. Plus I was extremely hung-over that day.
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3630
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M swallowed a watermelon seed and, within a few months, began to show. Her boyfriend was irate. All the good times we’ve had, and now a watermelon seed has done us in.
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128020
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“I can’t believe you went ahead and got pregnant without me,” I said.
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119500
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Gone Heather,
with her hands in her hair,
silent for help,
over-involved now scared.
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