She lived in the third floor apartment of a very tall and narrow brownstone at the south end of the District. A spindly tree of indeterminable age sprawled skyward and cast a dark and cool shadow across the building, its branches and leaves reflected in her window, looking so much cooler than the summer night sky it was mirroring.
A long and wide cement staircase tumbled down from double white doors, curving for the last five steps that widened as they reached the sidewalk. A cast iron railing provided guidance and comfort and a feeling of security.
He had been out for a walk that first July evening, clearing his head from something he’d been trying to write, failing miserably, the sickness of the silence digging deeper into him than ever before.…
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All to him was a morass, a hurly-burly intertwining of decomposition and formation, of crumbling and construction, the eternal transformation of space at every moment. Wherever he looked he saw decline and ascent, the rise and fall of seas past the farthest horizons. Cities crumbled, elsewhere cities rose; into the pits was gravel poured to staunch the demise by being a new ground for new birth, which soon would grey and become mulch.
“What is the purpose of life?”
“According to the Existentialists there is no inherent meaning to the universe except what one gives to it.”
– Joel Netsky …
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She looked at the six shots lined up before her. They stared her down. One, two, three, four, five and six. All vodka. All full to the top and waiting. A lemon-flavored Gatorade stood at the end, the ugly duckling of the bunch.
She had heard that a fetus less than twelve weeks old would not survive six shots of alcohol. It was how all those sorority girls had gone to keggers and fraternity hookups every weekend and rarely taken home a little linebacker. It was just too much for something that fragile. Something that new and pure. It didn’t matter what poison she picked, any one would do the job. She refused to hear the term “aborted” in her head.
She didn’t know if it was twelve weeks.…
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My name is Sunditi Desai and I am dead. I did not know it, not at first, when I woke to the natural up and down rhythm of the boat on the river. I am the daughter and grand-daughter of fishermen; the neighbor, wife and mother of fishermen. Waking up out here alone didn’t seem so strange to me. It was only when I lifted myself up on the red edged corners of the canoe, and the fancy jewelry we saved for death and marriages bobbed against my earlobes and wrists, did I begin to know the truth of it. I’m 86 years old. I wasn’t getting married.
I rubbed my thumb against the gold bracelets that wrapped around my arms; followed the silver embroidery of a bright white sari I’d never owned; traced the dark spray of moles on the skin of my forearm.…
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We like to think we’re built of major, minor, and trace elements, which use DNA as the recipe to mix and combine in patterns to make blood, bones, organs, skin,and such. Wrong. We are made of words. Words are in us from birth. As we grow, words take on meanings, so they can be combined and recombined indifferent patterns. Phrases and later sentences lock together, shaping how we move through our lives, more as architecture than language. Some of our words look inward and some outward, and we need a full complement of each. If some inward words are missing, we are incomplete. If some outward words are missing, there are gaps in our connections with others and these gaps are the distances between us.…
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The way that a single man carries the human race is a mystery. Some men carry it so closely that they have a place to put the catastrophes of human behavior when they come their way. They have a place for them in their body and on their face.
When the newspaper told Kamal Abdi in the morning of Nicaraguans killed or Salvadorans killed or Palestinians killed, he would make a place for them inside him. It was what he had always done. You started with the premise that the space you could make for them was infinite. Until human beings got it right, that was what it had to be.
On Saturday mornings, something very bright and alive would happen. On those days, he would not have to make a place for them inside him because he would have breakfast with his son.…
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It is more than a shadow over my face.
It is my own skull rising out of my skin
in slow motion;
the years piled up in the yard like slaughtered wolves.
Sometimes I catch my death
in the corner of my left eye
and trap it behind a contact lens.
Other times it will not be contained.
Some days it insists on itself
to anyone who will pay attention.
In the last room, I want it to be you.
Bring me a sprig of pussywillow
and all you ever were, in manuscript form.
I will be the old woman
clasping the limp word-corpse of some dead poet
tight to my chest, the smoke of my last burnt offering
rising from my mouth.
…
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