From: “Gravity Archives”

… forget
from little as your not quite six feet high,
but frictionless the air and iron ground.
One second sooner or one second late
would mean no accident but one more day
for cabbages and kings with nothing changed.
But time which makes no plans uncurled its hand
and battered you; then on its …

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Schmaltz of Significance

feeling as the Jewish pleadings with God, just with a different beat.” Jolson’s trajectory inspired Samson Raphaelson—whose screenwriting credits would later include The Shop Around the Corner, Suspicion, and Heaven Can Wait—to publish a short story called “Day of Atonement.” In 1925, it was adapted as a hit stage play called …

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Up Close

In the last scene of Carla Abdala-Diggs’s musical Federal Agent, set in fictional Argos, Ohio, the local undertaker is turned away from the home of the town’s beloved mayor. A former intelligence analyst with the FBI, the mayor has recently dropped dead of an apparent heart attack. It’s a shocking turn …

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Riding With Mr. Washington

… Garrett, he invented himself after Reconstruction’s end, a feat that inspires me as much as the story of his great-grandfather, an African who bought his freedom in 1819 and then managed, somehow, to release his wife and two of his children from bondage. Happenstance allowed C. G. Garrett to escape slavery—he was …

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Nights at the Opera

… first live, see the world, and become a worthy soldier. After a year or two, I will return to music, my only love.” That promise made him feel “renewed,” perhaps even reborn. From this point on, both the vow and music itself became “the basis of all [his] thoughts.”
And so would music remain for …

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Bards Behind Bars

… ruin it?”
Louis looked at me with his cold killer’s eyes, watching me react to the men’s anger and adrenaline. There would be no talk about “craft” today, just a visceral response to feeling cheated.
“It was good until that last page,” Louis said. “And then …” He shook his head. “Bullshit. Another scam.”

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Rage, Muse

… Robert Fitzgerald’s poetic English renderings and was swept away by their epic accounts of heroism and adventure. Several decades later, however, I began to have mixed feelings about these literary cornerstones. While I was reading the myths to a son not long past his toddler years, it occurred to me that the Greek gods …

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Drops in a Bucket

… gleaming buttons, and now, in summer, a straw hat, looking as if she were on parade. Concha wears a polar fleece over a housecoat, and on her feet are slippers. I’ve never seen her in a hat, or seen Conchita without one. Concha has family who come to check on her and lend a …

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The Support Ship

… asked about Stockton Rush, the pilot for that excursion and the CEO of OceanGate, the company that produced and owned the Titan. About Rush’s demise, one feels differently than about the others: he had been warned by several people about the possibility of implosion, and he had apparently sought to mitigate the legal ramifications …

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Martha Foley’s Granddaughters

… more, after which he asks her to promise not to forget the funny parts. Then:
I am remembering now but I am remembering alone. Real loneliness, I feel today, is not when nobody loves you, but when you have nobody to love. The little boy grew up to be a handsome, talented young man who …

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