Category: articles
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What is it then between us?
There are, they say, endless criteria that make “a New Yorker,” as opposed to someone who just lives here for a spell. Some say it’s three years minimum before you’ve earned the title. Others say five. Six. Ten. Still others say you’re not a New Yorker till you’ve hit a milestone like crying in public.…
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Suite Française by Irène Némirovsky
Author Irène Némirovsky penned the following lines in her journal: “My God! What is this country doing to me? Since it is rejecting me, let us consider it coldly, let us watch as it loses its honour and its life.” She wrote this a year into the German occupation of France during World War II…
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G E R M I N A T I O N
Life becomes alien in my hands a sniffle a startled sneeze that pursues comicality in irony, ever so foreign in every repetition. A tree grew out of my ears, it was planted when I was small and my father had opened up my skull to look for a foul germination; something must have fell in…
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M I D A S A N D C O L L E G E B O O K S
Tyrant stains within the spaces of my fingers; If you will take a ship from my wrist to these, Astrologers will sing ‘no’ in a chorus for my market value was next to none and the production cost alone took a small library or a two. Turmeric thumb— snap like the summon of a magician,…
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Americana
The TV set centered in the airy living room,breakfast flowing out of the kitchen, a fruit salad, garishly and gorgeously colorful,flavors waiting to be accepted into our plates.The screen door lets sunlight casually stream in,providing a view of rows of unextraordinarily neat suburban houses withthe greenest grass you ever did see.Next to the door, the…
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TIME
The moment I was clothed in sheep-woolAnd put out to bah with crowded language,I strayed, I strayedI dug the graves the vultures had ploughedAnd made a song to amuseThe charade called joker-faced destiny Marx said you are too goodIn markets to run, all the stable boy paradesWe ran, we ranInspecting the pulps found in the…
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Ulster County
It’s all of us and the small towns that hurt us. Leaving you was like prison escape and I knew it. It was simple hard, I didn’t know how much poison there was in the water fountain water and school lunch until I left, coughing up blood every once and a while for years. “oh…
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Meat
I was not ready. When she and her sister began carefully browsing the feeder after a single hour, it felt like something had gone wrong. The sanity test of my waiting and the natural world it reveals still lay ahead: the darkening changes in the sky, disappearing contours of brush, the straining of my senses.…
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Anyways
It’s just the way things are, they never change,told you I’ll tell you more later. The world spins with or without us,but know I wanted you here. Speeches only work in the presentand old words can’t save you later. And I can’t always be there. I was looking for the secret of the universe but…
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Michael the Psychic
I called Michael Umlauf on a Friday afternoon, requesting an interview in the form of a voice mail. He returned my call within the hour. “Yes, I can do tomorrow,” he said. “My wife just got out of the ICU so I’m going to see her at 1:30, but I can do before.” I remember…
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Sillage
In the city of lights there lived a blind old man named Didier. In the mornings he cried, in the evenings he drank, and his bones ached always. He had a son, Michel, and a wife, Ana, who both loved him while Ana was alive. Didier enjoyed eating, and he typically visited different bakeries around…
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Letting Your Dreams Fly
Objective: throw a roll of toilet paper through a hanging hoola hoop in front of students crazed on the fumes of homecoming. He’ll do it. He kept telling himself that all the days prior. And guess what? He did! I mean the kids went crazy. He went crazy. He ripped his shirt off because nobody…