fiction
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What He Wanted in a Woman
“What do you want in a woman?” she asked him. It was his turn and he dreaded it. He looked at the others in the circle, afraid. “What I think I want,” he began hesitantly, before remembering to breathe, “what I want is a woman who loves—I mean, desires the male body, but hates men.”
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Leaves
She took the kids to Briarwood park hoping she wouldn’t meet anyone she knew. She needed to be alone—and think. In summer she had brought the children here to swim, so she knew there was a small playground with monkey-bars and swings near the woods. It was a park frequented mostly by immigrant families. No
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The Naked Atheist
Had the gods bodies like men and women, desire would be the elixir, passion the holy sacrament, coitus the zenith of heaven. But the gods are forever bodiless, and so bodily delight — the greatest wonderment of all — became the entitlement of sunny earth. Naked atheist looked at naked atheist and they smiled. Sex
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Drop of Summer
Tonight the wolf moon stares across the night and howls its low & mournful, mid-winter howl. Darkness, and winter still, and a moon-howl of cold still on its way. But the afternoon! The slow, unwinter-like hours of sun-flakes wafting down. The pregnant, lazy warmness. As if a day of summer had dripped into January. The
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Dark Sea
Another sweep of cloud over the moon, and the darkness starts again. I climb the promontory and hug my Buddha, and sit and face the darkness of the sea. Dark, peaceful, quiet and only the wave in my ear. A few shore lights lean across the bay. Torches line the lagoon in front of the
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Near & Far
When I look at these mists that separate trees near from trees far, I realize how much in my life are separated the things up close from the things afar. Though my heart holds steady to the things far away and my mind, like a ship guided by an unknown captain, follows closely after—the tread tread tread of
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Frustration
I know now that there is a well of anger in every man, that occasionally springs up and brims over when frustration has flooded in too secretly and collected up. It is the frustration of trying to fit ourselves into lives, with the excess trimmed off and subverted. Too much that is vital in us
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from Material for a Machado de Assis style book
First there are the leaves, brown in winter. The people are the leaves. They are walking brown across sidewalks and yellow grass between classes and November bells. The people are the leaves. And the leaves are brown. They walk together, earnest in conversation, or walk shouldered together across the sidewalks: in November. Yes, first there