| Melville |
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| ALAN SOLDOFSKY | |
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Published in The Georgia Review. Volume 57 – Number 2, Summer 2003 |
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cannot loiter long in this downtown library branch without being asked what you're looking for. I said I always wanted to read The Lives of the Squids. The librarian mentioned that there were three volumes. She looked me over like I was an olive in a root beer glass. I'd rather do origami |
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than read about the construction of innocence in the nineteenth century. I'm not a formalist, but I can read inscriptions on a crypt as well as the next guy. I'm tired of living on salt pork and whale fat: Bored with looking into the dead mouths of coelacanths . She looked at me as if I had taken something unspeakable out of my pocket. |
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She said she could look up mollusks on her computer. Cephalopods I corrected. That's when she explained that there was a prejudice in this district, dependent as it was on the bovine economy. Excuse me, I said. I said the truth was I had recently fractured my knee, which caused me to speak on several topics at once. What was I saying just now? |
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She looked so sweet then, so terribly thin. I barely stifled an impulse I suddenly had to touch her ear. I'm sorry, I said, but I had lost my thought. As she tilted forward I could see her forehead's waxy gleam, her pasty, white neck, the light slipping down the modest slope of a breast. Oh, I was lost. |
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By the time I came to my senses I realized I was standing beside a whirlpool . There was no way I could go back to what I had been doing, parsing sentences. Doing piecework. I had to shape up. I had been drowning in pages of water. Living in a group home. Surely I knew that the truth slanted . What sad harpoon had I lashed myself to? |
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On what bone had I been gnawing? I had consented to the doctrine of filth only because what else could one do. How could I have not seen the taxi cabs idling, their signs turned off? It was time to go by then. The air was being shut off a little at a time. There was a lance in my side. She was saying something. She was telling me a fable about obedience she thought was important for me to know. |
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