Category: Writing
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Idiot Box: Love In the Time of Rockets
Love in the Time of Rockets James always had roses and photographs. I always had schemes and costumes. We drew maps, swapped clothes and identity, names like the backs of trading cards. Always one more to catch, another to lose. He fed the carp in the garden pond; I let the cat inside when it…
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Idiot Box: ‘Turning Japanese’
Turning Japanese I was a girl you splashed with water. He spoke only in signs and subtitles. We kissed on his bed under a blue and pink horizon of cigarette smoke. Outside his window there were fireflies. Inside his walls there were infomercials. I carried a sword too big for my fragile hands, he drifted…
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Idiot Box: ‘Hand Grenade’
Hand Grenade In the month of bones I wear red galoshes for black-market Theraflu; we heard they took it off the market because junkies use it to break bad. On your side of town, you gather up single-serve soup cups and treat us both to the tissues with lotion in them. You wear your leather…
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Idiot Box: ‘Except the Cops’
Except the Cops I am not the first mystery you will ever solve. An old Chandler novel, an unsigned note, page numbers circled in a telephone sequence. These are the clues you use to track me down. We have never met before you call evening L.A. time; it’s midnight here when you start to read.…
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Idiot Box: ‘What We Talk About When We Talk About Michael Westen’
What We Talk About When We Talk About Michael Westen You are only a handful of dress shirts, but you are a different man each time you wear them. Walk, accent, tie or no tie. It’s only when you’re stripped bare that I recognize you at all. These days, you’re naked less and less often…
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Jem is a Bitch
In a weird fit of Nostalgia For Things I Barely Remember Existing (I get these sometimes), I went back and watched JEM on Netflix. I didn’t get very far because I am a Grown-Ass Lady with Things To Do, like losing at computer chess or fretting about wedding plans. But in re-watching the pilot, I…
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Learning to Let it All Go
Ian and I are getting married in just over a month. Part of our planning process has been, of course, the magic that is the gift registry and all the possibilities therein. A stand mixer! Matching towels! Pots with lids that fit! I have become a living version of Once Upon a Honeymoon. But with the…
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Make the Time
My biggest pet peeve is when writers tell me, “I don’t have time to write.” It’s a lament I hear all the time, oh, how do you find the time? I wish I had some free time to write, I just really want to write a book but I’m so busy. . . and then, inevitably, the…
Libby Cudmore 