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Cold War Theory
I was wearing a woman’s bathrobe and galoshes, and had tied a scarf around my waist. I was too conscious of touch, by then, to wear regular clothing. But I needed to talk to Professor Litvak again, so I had to wear something. “Come in,” he said, when I knocked. “Tell me about it.” His…
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Can vei la lauzeta mover
A Translation Bernart de Ventadorn “Can vei la lauzeta mover” I When I see the lark break its wings against a sunbeam, forget itself, and fall from that sweet joy that pierces the heart, O—my own could melt, envying all those I see rejoicing. II Alas—how I hoped to know love, yet how little have…
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On Sunday Morning
I heard the subway pouring out of your mouth. I thought, maybe, it was an early-morning thing, letting sleep spill from your body onto the week-worn floor. I didn’t ask you to reveal this to me, I cling to the milky curtain that lets you stay a hanging portrait. Now I see the clear lines…
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Half is Just Enough to Make Sure You Will Eat another Someday
Enough of this, this mania, and the fear that your body will turn against you. Keep waking up in the empty morning and its thin light, and everything will be the same for the rest of us. This should calm you: that nobody can see the blood that’s been rolling through you, shouting that here…
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Wondering What Makes the Sea Angry During a Storm
The frantic thrust against a worn beach front. The need to fling upwards and the sickening curling under of a mind changing suddenly.
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Camouflage (An Excerpt)
Disappointment characterized not the first birth, but the second in the amniotic procession the twins enacted on May 16, 1978. It was the first of many staged productions for the energetic children of withered opera rose Emilia Hemmings. Emilia knew just what she was getting, no surprises for her. Only two months earlier, peering into…
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God Loves the Plagiarist
It was completely dark when they got back to the hotel. The night was warm and the windows wide open. “I’ve decided to give you up,” she said. “Husband?” There was a short silence. “No. He’s out of town.” “Well, look. What’s there to think about? You’d be better off not respecting yourself, but doing…
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The Yay
Emma and Dani were sprawled out on the bed in Dani’s room snorting cocaine with a one hundred dollar bill and a small mirror that had once belonged to Dani’s pink jewelry box. The kind with the ballerina that you had to wind; when the box opened, the ballerina would twirl around and around to…
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Firewalk
Hi, this is Danny Aiello, I was the guy talking to your sister this afternoon around 4:30, the Elvis? Listen, I just wanted to ask you if you could tell her to give me a call because well, as you know, I just met her today and I thought we had this really incredible chemistry.…
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The Perfect Fetish
Whether or not we agree that the iPod somehow essentializes the twentyfirst century–an intriguing claim, if not intentionally exaggerated–the more general principle underlying that claim is reasonable enough: the idea that one might “read the state of the cultural spirit [Geist] off of the sundial of human technology.” (1)
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Two Stories
I don’t really examine things too closely. Everything is not a work of art. I’m not like those academics, those writers that go along looking for the meaning of the world in everything that they find on the street.