Tag: saraband
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Permanente Quarry
Into the quarry, rocks cascade -but mining here has numbered days,if the county plan gets its way.The pit will merge with a preserve,leaving forest sounds undisturbed.Birdsong, crickets, and flowing creekmake the music that hikers seek.
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Real Possibility
There’s a real possibility that the Tesla in front of youruns a red light, drifting into the intersection like a yachtthrough a lock after its owner paid a bribe for faster passage,entitled to ignore the law. There’s also an actual chancethe bucket with a stool sampleyou shipped next-day by UPSwill show you have colon cancer,or…
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Kayak Instructor
Instead of exerting yourself to drag the paddle through water, let your other blade push the air. Trust me, you will propel your boat. Remember, the core of your strength is neither from arms or shoulders, but in your hips and abdomen. Seek to glide with efficiency – hull speed is plenty fast enough. Allow…
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Oyster Mood
Everything is an irritant: a grain of sand I cannot locate rubbing against my sunburned thighs. Coffee on an empty stomach. Hunger without appetite. A cough that dislodges nothing, not even a shimmering pearl.
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Making Waffles
The first one is always ruined, batter stuck to the hot iron: a sacrifice of egg and flour to hungry breakfast demigods who demand more butter, more oil in order for them to release the next onto my spatula. Devotedly applying grease to the black honeycomb altar before I attempt another, this offering is rewarded…
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First Beard
My first attempt to grow a beard was when I was hospitalized for cutting my wrist with a knife. After some days of patchy growth, I saw myself in the mirror of the psych ward’s common bathroom and decided to shave it off. Closely monitored by a nurse, I used a razor on my face…
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“Keep Moving”
My 90-year-old grandma said when I told her I was bereft after my first wife called it quits. This was almost ten years ago and even now what comes to mind is a nurse shark on the seabed slowly scoping their feeding grounds: a sluggish but deliberate motion to keep a vital flow of oxygen…
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Elephant Family
The matriarch is named Gaia. She has led them hundreds of miles from the savanna through salt flat to a river where they can drink. Thirst slaked, the herd continues south to the Okavango delta, passing through veldt rife with lions. One night, the parents must scramble to shield their young from the big cats.…
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Little Valkyrie
When my sister was a baby dad would fly her around the house singing “Ride of the Valkyries”. His voice operatic, he swooped her low so she bombed us with drool and we laughed, smiling up at her, little steward of Valhalla.
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Kitchen Sink Soirée
The top of the dish soap bottle drips unused suds, like melting wax down the side of a tall candle placed beside a grand piano at a salon soirée, the sink an instrument for performance every evening after dinner.
From the Firefly Galaxy 