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STET-US QUO
The mind can bea brutal editor, revisinghistory, rejecting memorieswithout a substantial rewrite. My step sister, many yearsdead remains five, thatyoung face engraftedon the woman ravagedby unrelenting cancers. My first wife of 30 yearsis mostly faceless, themental pictures and dreamsedited until only sheis unrecognizable. And in moments of reflectionI am no longer adopted,the step-siblings were,but they…
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MAGIC MIRROR ON THE WALL
The face in the mirror this morningwas not mine, perhaps it wasthat of my grandparents, allI never met, having onlyold and faded pictures that vaguelyresemble the mirror’s face. It might be my parents, bothdead before I found them onlyyearbook pictures and just possiblea vague similarity to the facethat i see in the mirror each day.…
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A MATTER OF TIME
It was onlya matter of time,and the time has comewhen the Chinesewould abandonthe time honored“please to beplacing the Tab Awithinside the sloton Part E,”and insteadmerely showundecipherablepictures of parts,so that withbut a singleset of instructionsthey can frustratebuyers in all nations.
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PLEASE TO FOLLOW INSTRUCTIONS
At least some Chinese manufacturershave seemingly grown tired of ourendless mockery of their instructions. No longer do they tell me “please to beinserting the extended aspectof part A into part B in the slotted area.” Now they give me wordless instructions,a series of pictures with lettered partswhich seems easier until, after unpacking the many pieces,…
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SORT OF
She is sifting through photo albums deciding which pictures to keep, which to discard, questioning why she kept some in the first place, blurred, ill composed. She sets very high standards now wondering why some were taken, the sun she says, all wrong here, the background in that one just swallows the subjects. I left…
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OH, THE PLACES
“Every book is a picture book,” she says, with that certain wisdom the that comes from being seven, even though eight is far off on the horizon. “The difference with some,” she claims, “is that someone already drew all the lines and colored in the pictures.” She likes the books, she concludes, where she gets…
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THE WALL
No one is certain who painted the words on the wall. No one knew when the painting occurred, someone noticed the words one morning and told others, and the word spread through town. People stopped to look at the words, but few understood what they meant. Soon there were pictures drawn around the words, familiar…
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DEEP INTO THE COSMOS
I want to tell her to look up into the night sky and imagine the stars are forming pictures just for her alone, and what she sees is what the cosmos intended all along. She laughs when I say this, says, the pictures were all taken a thousand years ago and given names, like Orion…
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an old writer and his words 