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LABORING
There are those few momentswhen they sit on the bermaround the Igloo jug trying to findthe shade from a spindly palm cut backto almost nothing, the sunetching the sky with a molten heatthat melts away the few cloudsfoolish enough to appear.One keeps an eye outfor the supervisor knowinglunch is hours off and there areno breaks…
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BONDS
When she asks me if I remember whenI lost my virginity I have to stopand consider the question beforethe obvious answer appears and I say“according to my birth certificate, Ilost my virginity at 11:31 P,Mat the Washington Children;sMedical Center more than sevendecades ago, although I haveto admit I have no recollectionof the event, nor the…
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PRISONER (Trigger Warning: effects of abortion laws)
I can see the young girl stuckin their world, her uterusswollen by the unbridledlust of the rapist, orher father or uncle.She is a prisoner of heruterus, under the everwatchful eye of the stateand she wants only the freedomtheir law now denies her.I see this world and trembleknowing we all are buta ballot from its realizationand…
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BLEEDING EDGE
Someone needs to tell old Murphyhe got it only half right.Sure things go wrongat the worst possible momentand that’s the half he got right.What he didn’t say, didn’t know,is that in our age of electronicsand planned obsolescencethings are perpetually going wrong,so of course some will do soat the worst possible momentand others will simply causebad…
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SERVED COLD
We had better hope that naturedoesn’t adopt that old adagethat revenge is a dish best served cold.Come to think of it, perhaps shehis toying with it now by her actionsgiven the climate changes we have wrought,And us always thinking nature wouldsomehow become subservient to us.But you can only defy the lawsof nature for so long,…
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NOT THAT
A writing teacher I admireonce told me that my truecreative self would only beunleashed if I stoppedwriting about what I knewand began writingabout what I didn’t know.I knew what he meantbut I can be a literal soulall too often, with yearsof practicing law and inthat state of mind I knewI was doomed to failurefor if…
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PAINFUL LEARNING
It was a lesson that took himfar too long to learn,was one he needed for years.He couldn’t remember all the timesthat he had set out to accomplish somethingyet that day was given over to Murphyor the corollary of his famous law,for he almost never accomplishedwhat he had set out to do.But the lesson was deeply…
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YOU LOSE EITHER WAY
The timing could not have been worse. But when Murphy does the planning, the timing will always never be worse. You do wonder just who Murphy was. Certainly not the kind old gentleman who owned the pub by that name in midtown Manhattan. Maybe a distant cousin of Mrs. O’Leary. I mean even the cow…
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MY RABBI (PART 1)
If you ask why I am a BuddhistI will tell you there are a myriadof possible reasons, choose one,or take this one, it fits nicely. I am in college, pulling my gradesup to mediocre, thoughts of medicinegone, law only faint on a distant horizona master’s degree away. I visit my childhood rabbi, a manwho has…
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BENT ARROW
He would never understand how time developed a flexibility that defied the laws of physics. An hour, a minute, a second, they were all standard measures. Each the same as every other. Yet lately they had changed, flexed. For the most part they had gotten shorter, shrunken. He knew that wasn’t possible until he remembered…