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Raymond And Ann

Notes Of An Unknown Writer

I am now at an age where I have watched people grow old. They look older, maybe more feeble, their bodies thickening, their bones feeling more frail or their bodies a little stooped, their faces worried in a way I have always associated with older people. I see my friends looking more and more like my aunts and uncles did when I was a child. This is the first generation I have seen grow old. And it is a shock.

Dark Honor: Vietnam Remembered

Both men were probably in their forties, tending their fields like the men of their village had for a thousand years, defending their families and their livelihood and their land like men everywhere. In a few hours or in a few days they would be dead — after the ARVN beat confessions out of them, or applied electrodes to their balls and sent jolts of concentrated anguish through their bodies until they wished to escape by dying, by being shot in the head or dragged behind an Amphtrack or thrown from a helicopter, anything to make the pain stop.

Abortion

Secret codes, an underground network of doctors, complications

Selected Poems

Bodhisattva

She saw clearly that God was physical, that God excluded nothing from His being, that there was no sensation or perception but that God was the sensation, perception, and the very consideration of these things.

Mistaken Identity

I want to love myself the way a stubborn question loves certainty, loves it in spite of itself.

Men And Their Sorrows

An Interview With John Lee

Most men are afraid to stop working because if they do, they will have to confront their pain directly. A man who works twenty hours a week has time to consider his anxieties. A man who works forty to sixty hours a week can avoid looking at everything.

Songs Of Aging Children

My mother is seated in the shade of the balcony of her apartment in San Diego, the sun relentless in this desert-become-a-city. She stares into that cloudless blue sky. Cancer has begun its final assault upon her body.

Three Audreys

Lil’ Audrey had heard that joke weeks before at school, but she didn’t think people, even her Daddy, should be telling jokes about the dead. Besides, she knew Octavia’s grandson, Skeeter, was one of Dr. King’s followers.