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I’m not much for magic, although I love “believing” the magician, probably out of sympathy for the performer. I don’t try to figure out his or her tricks, and I don’t feel cheated. I tried to watch Guillermo Del Toro’s adaption of Nightmare Alley, an epic novel about the rise and fall from grace of…
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I smelled the rubbery stink of an overheated engine.
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Antofagasta is a northern port city in Chile.
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The Brown family, a farming family with roots in the American Revolution, invited my family to watch the McCarthy hearings on television. We didn’t have a TV and, like most of the established families in our little Massachusetts town, the Browns wanted us to know they didn’t like Joe McCarthy and his witch hunt one…
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I write to change the world. Why do I want to change the world? Because it needs it.
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Please note that the word "justice" never appears in this broadside.
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He never talked to me about girls or women or sex or marriage...
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It was a cool gig, for sure.
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A woman holds a child in a paint-scabbed bunker beneath a burning steel mill. She is surrounded by children made oblivious by trauma. I try to imagine the shock waves from exploding bunker buster bombs that must travel through the reinforced concrete and steel floors and collapsed factory roof above her head. I can’t imagine…
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I’m connected to you. Intimately. I don’t just stick my viral tongue down your throat and dive into the gooey mucus of your lungs. I don’t just rabble rouse such a riot among your antibodies that they rise up and blindly attack their host, your body. Your own rogue antibodies kill you. Go figure. I…
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<< Older posts
The magic’s in the music…*
Prompted By Do You Believe in Magic?
/ Stories

The Great Arkansas Freeze Plug Blow Out
Prompted By Car Trouble
/ Stories

The Two Sisters of Antofagasta
Prompted By What I Own That's Older Than I Am
/ Stories

Men in Suits
Prompted By Broadcast News
/ Stories

Why do I write?
Prompted By Why We Write
/ Stories

Lost in Translation
Prompted By Lost in Translation
/ Stories

Conversations with my old man
Prompted By What My Father Told Me
/ Stories

Busting a Banned-Book Barbecue
Prompted By Banned Books
/ Stories

A Zig Zag Confusion
Prompted By Refugees
/ Stories

We’re Here, We’re Queer…
Prompted By Pandemic, Year Three
/ Stories
