May 2012
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Pediatric Suicide
by Franz Wright
Being who you are is not a disorder. Being unloved is not a psychiatric disorder. I can’t find being born in the diagnostic manual. I can’t find being born to a mother incapable of touching you. I can’t find being born on the shock treatment table. Being offered affection unqualified safety and respect when and only when you score dope for your father is not a diagnosis. Putting...
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In Those Years
by Adrienne Rich
In those years, people will say, we lost track of the meaning of we, of you we found ourselves reduced to I and the whole thing became silly, ironic, terrible: we were trying to live a personal life and yes, that was the only life we could bear witness to But the great dark birds of history screamed and plunged into our personal weather They were headed somewhere else but their...
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I Almost Went To Bed
by Leonard Cohen
I almost went to bed without remembering the four white violets I put in the button-hole of your green sweater and how i kissed you then and you kissed me shy as though I’d never been your lover
Women When They Put Their Clothes On In The...
It’s really a very beautiful exchange of values when women put their clothes on in the morning and she is brand-new and you’ve never seen her put her clothes on before.
You’ve been lovers and you’ve slept together and there’s nothing more you can do about that, so it’s time for her to put her clothes on.
Maybe you’ve already had breakfast and she’s slipped her sweater on to cook a nice...
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Peggy Olson, I love you.
“It took me a long time to realize that my partners were having sex with me in...”
– Fat Sex: What Everyone Wants to Know but is Afraid to Ask
“I believed that I wanted to be a poet, but deep down I just wanted to be a poem.”
– Jaime Gil de Bieda
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No One’s Gonna Love You - Band of Horses
Track Conditions
After you decide again that every fortune unfurled from a cookie means me and I decide that every song on the jukebox means you, I travel from college to see you in your first new apartment. Save thirty dollars taking the train first from the city to Trenton, then from Trenton to Philadelphia. Four hours to shuttle eighty miles. And somewhere on the way out of Jersey, that first train trembles...
“I’m going to be singing ‘Dreams’ and ‘Rhiannon’ when I’m 75 - and that’s just...”
– Stevie Nicks
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What I Wouldn't Do
by Dorianne Laux
The only job I didn’t like, quit after the first shift, was selling subscriptions to TV Guide over the phone. Before that it was fast food, all the onion rings I could eat, handing sacks of deep fried burritos through the sliding window, the hungry hands grabbing back. And at the laundromat, plucking bright coins from a palm or pressing them into one, kids screaming from...
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Anthony came over yesterday and tried out Skyrim for a few hours. It was fun and he liked it and doesn’t regret buying the game, and so he’s excited to play on his own console.
After booting it up this afternoon, however, I’ve just discovered that with us fiddling a trial with him (as a Breton, of all races,) my console has overwritten my 90 hours of gameplay as a Redguard.
Perfectly Human
by Miles Walser
So you were born backwards. Your heart covers 80% of your skin. It is huge—and it is fragile. You don’t know how to chain-link fence your feelings. You will find your trust abandoned and bruised on the side of the road— Do not leave it there— Dust it off and put it right back under your shirt.
If you don’t learn to stop apologizing for yourself, you will mirage out of...
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Why I love Raymond Carver →
youmightfindyourself:
By: Adam McInturf
To sum up Carver in two words, call him “Hemingway meets.” Not Hemingway meets a social conscience or feminine sensitivity, but just other beings. Carver’s stories still, for the most part, center male protagonists, who remain haunted by unseen scars. But his stories are about what happens when these men collide with other people, with friends, with...
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“More than putting another man on the moon,
more than a New Year’s resolution of...”
– “Slow Dance,” Matthew Dickman
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Crushworthy
by R. Eirik Ott
I want someone to have a crush on me for a change to notice when I don’t come to class and wonder if I’m okay to get nervous when I enter the cafe, to fumble with her papers and books, to pick at her clothing and check her reflection in salt shakers and napkin holders to catch her breath when she sees me from across campus, tug on her best friend’s collar and...
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Puttanesca
by Michael Heffernan
Before I gave up wondering why everything was a lot of nothing worth losing or getting back, I took out a jar of olives, a bottle of capers, a container of leftover tomato sauce with onions, put a generous portion of each in olive oil just hot enough but not too hot, along with some minced garlic and a whole can of anchovies, until the mixture smelled like a...
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Compulsively Allergic to the Truth
by Jeffrey McDaniel
I’m sorry I was late. I was pulled over by a cop for driving blindfolded with a raspberry-scented candle flickering in my mouth. I’m sorry I was late. I was on my way when I felt a plot thickening in my arm. I have a fear of heights. Luckily the Earth is on the second floor of the universe. I am not the egg man. I am the owl who just witnessed another tree fall...
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Recipe For Happiness Khaborovsk Or Anyplace
by Lawrence Ferlinghetti
One grand boulevard with trees with one grand cafe in sun with strong black coffee in very small cups. One not necessarily very beautiful man or woman who loves you.
“You never look at me from the place from which I see you.”
– Jacques Lacan
“One of the most commonly overlooked spiritual practices is daring to be...”
– Matt Kahn
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Boulevard du Montparnasse
by Mary Jo Salter
Once, in a doorway in Paris, I saw
the most beautiful couple in the world.
They were each the single most beautiful thing in the world.
She could have been sixteen, perhaps; he twenty.
Their skin was the same shade of black: like a shiny Steinway.
And they stood there like a four-legged instrument
of a passion so grand one could barely imagine them
ever working, or eating, or...
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I just paid nearly $1000 in total for Coldplay tickets on behalf of my friends and I. I don’t know whether to cry out of sorrow for my bank account or happiness that I’ll finally see them live.
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Topography
by Sharon Olds
After we flew across the country we got in bed, laid our bodies intricately together, like maps laid face to face, East to West, my San Francisco against your New York, your Fire Island against my Sonoma, my New Orleans deep in your Texas, your Idaho bright on my Great Lakes, my Kansas burning against your Kansas, your Eastern Standard Time pressing into my Pacific Time, my...
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Write About An Empty Birdcage
by Elaina M. Ellis
Write about an empty birdcage. As in: write about your ribcage after robbery. Use negative space to wind a song from the place on the dresser where a music box isn’t. Write about the corners where the two of you used to meet. Draw the intersections, arrow to the sidewalk where her shoes aren’t near yours. Write about an empty birdcage. As in: write about a...
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eternally depressed that I only began appreciating LCD Soundsystem once they broke up and disappeared.
“I can bear any pain as long as it has meaning.”
– Haruki Murakami, 1Q84
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Autobiography
by Alfian bin Sa’at
Like most of us, I can’t remember how I was separated from my first love (Did it die, did I break it, was it stolen Or did it fly out through the open window?) I didn’t have the radio-tuning parents Who filled the house with music Or instilled in me “a love of the cinema.” I never recalled my mother coming home From the hairdressers’ with a...
being nice gets you nowhere.
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Helen of Troy Does Countertop Dancing
by Margaret Atwood
The world is full of women who’d tell me I should be ashamed of myself if they had the chance. Quit dancing. Get some self-respect and a day job. Right. And minimum wage, and varicose veins, just standing in one place for eight hours behind a glass counter bundled up to the neck, instead of naked as a meat sandwich. Selling gloves, or something. Instead of what I do...
