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TONGUES
Ninety-six years ago today Women gained the right to vote. It would be another five before those who preceded the lot of us were blessed with citizenship, the least we could offer, after our prior gifts of disease, alcoholism and down sizing. Who, our forebears must have imagined, wouldn’t want to live somewhere they had…
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ANTWERP
It is seven in the morning Antwerp arises slowing in winter the small bar along seldom used quays of Schelde is almost empty, one old man tottering on his stool swaying to breath head pressed on the counter. Young couple, she brown haired pale white skin against white sweater, he long blond woven into a…
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BOOTCAMP
The butterflies came in the night floating through the barracks window, mainly monarchs, orange and black but the occasional yellow, with more gossamer wings, and the odd white with small green patches, one to a wing. There is a corner in my footlocker that is mine, where I can hide the tattered book of poems.…
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SNAKE EYES
They roll in, one after the next, after the next, gaps that appear in their rank are soon enough filled. By night you mark them by their red lights, lemmings with no cliff in sight, so they sit one alongside the next in the queue, disgorging their chattering, smiling contents into the vast building, and…
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DO NOT FORWARD
I thought about sending you a postcard, one with the Riviera in the background or from Vieux Nice, with its teeming life, after all, we did have 30 years together. We never came here, I haven’t been back to the places we went together since they, like so much of what we shared, I left…
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A TURN
He is never certain what to do on days like this one, when the winter takes a particularly nasty turn, the temperature hovers at utter emptiness, and the wind elects to try to enfold everything it can reach in a coat of frost, that bleaches life away. He walks each day, through the nearby park…
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EARTH MOTHER
In so many mythologies earth is a woman, a mother, and we arise from within her. The pure and simple logic of this assumption cannot be assailed, for she is the crux of all nature, and as it seems in life, it is all too often the males that lay siege and wage wars that…
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FIFTEEN MINUTES IN A LIFE
I walked slowly into the darkened showroom of the tattoo parlor, walls lined with the wares of the burly, bearded man dragon rampant on his chest barely contained by the Harley T-shirt. Look around, he said, till you see what you want, I’ll be here. On one wall all manner of dragons and other dreamlike…
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MASTER CRAFTSMAN
He waited patiently in the queue until, after two and one half hours he approached the battered metal counter. The young, bored woman, chewing at her gum asked the usual question, have you looked hard for work this last week? I stood in many lines, for hours on end in my battered old shoes, that…
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NOT _____ AWAY
There are moments, he said, when everything is suddenly clear, and obvious to me. But they slip away and their shadows quickly fade. She said, if you’d stop looking for the fog, the clarity might linger. Besides, she adds how do you know what is clear and what is not.
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an old writer and his words 