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The Art of . . . She soared to the moon on the back of a pink seagull, ate cheese puffs with her mustached father in a balloon high above Mars, or licked saffron ice cream in a field of lollipops grown by a band of whirling dwarfs. The children gathered daily for their dose of tall tales, believed, as if she, with her wild hair, licorice black eyes, and snowball cheekbones, were the daughter of a poet and a witch. In high school she rolled her stories like weed between math sheets, in toilet paper, yellow school bulletins; smoked and sold, gifted and inhaled. Addiction to telling melted truth doesn’t land a girl in rehab, but it does make a red rhymer out of one, a woman who sighs I love you to the one who pulls her into a hot tub of glass and painted tiles; a man who guitar-plays her inner thighs and dances tattoos of flying insects across his wide, muscle-hilled arms. 27 ...

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