Let’s just imagine Tim with a seven-year-old girl. Just imagine!
Overheard in CLA 214 Precept
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The Insectoid in the Kitchen
“Benji looked at his insect mother with suspicion. She was acting unusually attentive.”
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Bluebells + How to Stop the Bleeding
Bluebells “The temple bell stops— but the sound keeps coming out of the flowers.” – Bashō Truth is the quiet color of the wind over the ocean, the temple on the cliffside, the oxidized bell that sweeps clean the plain. It stops the dust from building up as a patina,…
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How to Have a Spring Fling
A Nass writer revels in the aftermath of a brief love affair, and argues that there is beauty in its being contained.
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Ragmans’
“Mac lit his cigarette with a Zippo while Louie blocked the wind with his hands. Once it caught, Mike breathed in deeply with his eyes closed, then blew out a big cloud towards the street.”
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Shoulder Strain
The golden sand of a cemetery wound claws with rancor, rests its plaster-filled palms on your provident shoulders, steers you into this braided soil and, Lord, it molds you like a Scythian collar, its latch unsealed.
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Once Upon a Time, There Was a Mountain – Part 3: The Story
“A girl arrived at the temple gate in the autumn of 2008. She was nine or ten, barefoot, her feet thick with hardened skin and scaly with sores. She sat down in the courtyard and looked at the monk with the peculiar weatheredness of a child who has lived through things that did not belong…
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Romantic Orientalism
On the travel writings of Gertrude Bell and Freya Stark, and the imperial tool of aestheticization in the Middle East.
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Woman of Clay
“She believed she was molded from clay. The same clay that made the fish in the canal and the flowers in the grass.”
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Necessary Information
“She gave the florist her name, Sally Hawthorne, and her telephone number and new address, and asked if he would put her name in the system. She explained that she and her husband had just moved, that the house didn’t feel like home, so she’d been looking for somewhere nice to buy flowers, but found…
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Letter From The Editor
Dear friends, To walk through a home where you once lived, to see someone to whom you once felt connected, to re-read a book you loved as a child—these are often deeply disappointing experiences. The walls of your old bedroom seem much closer to each other than they once did. Your old friend’s eccentricities,…
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Migueleo
“Xiomara turned to face him. Her face was so pale that it glowed in the darkness of the living room. On the mantle to her right, by the television stand, the clock read five in the morning.”
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I run into the red
Let’s bundle up this longing to know another / fling curtains over doors / we need more blindness. I gawk at compasses / hallucinate edged circles / stop their revelatory revolutions. A matador’s calculations are never constant / I was formulated for distance. I run into the red, and the cloth is your palm. The…