"By dawnlight, the town is a fever dream of highway mirages, clapboard houses, and dusty streets full of strays. Traffic moves at the pace of daydreams along grid roads, going from neighborhoods laid out like barracks to perfectly rectangular plazas. All that military order a futile barricade against the mirages, against the truth that the mirages tell: that Lawton can vanish like a false oasis, that its order is a pattern writ in the dust of a forgotten plains country. The military men make the town possible, and they have been stationed here and not elsewhere for reasons obscure. Lawton: the violent incarnation of a college town, where honor hangs so heavy in the air that a wrong look can lead to a family feud, that honking your horn in traffic is challenging a man to a duel."
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""Flowers?!" The chlorophyll enveloped me as I chanted through the daisy-lined boulevard. The chlorophyll...it wasn't right, that construction was incorrect, that image unimagined. Now that I think of it, it was not chlorophyll at all. The redness ate me. That's what I meant. Yes, certainly. The redness devoured me! "Sure, mother. Flowers would be delicious."
"All right. Get in the tub, I'll unwrap your soap." "Oh." "Can you turn the water on, honey?" "Oh."" [READ FULL WORK] |
"For prose, you sit, and craft, and pray
for knowledge in the crudest way to flatter whims and coax delights of timely readers, on timely nights; But poetry, from nature streams, unheeded by the critic's lip-- to readers primal rhythms brings to writers, primal gifts." [READ FULL WORK] |
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