Page 378

By Jack Joseph Smith

Short Stories Dear Mr. Dennis Lienemann I wasn't an Indian Her eyes were stern and always a lift in her Smile The brat with her balloons and then a leather chair The walk with blue suede shoes Over the railing with my son Pus ed off of Big Bear Me as John Wayne Across the border for a shoe shine A bad view from a bridge First and last shot Eyes on the mat How his life and death had reached the stars The only emotionally disturbed kid getting paid Homosexuality of the heart The only name on the Tower The belt in the fireplace Let him play the gutar And she wasn't even sixteen One knee on the cement To only want the river Crying does not exist To let him go his way At the top of the stairs The Minister and the millworker and the piano The first of the wine The better part of the Hearse

Original Scan

Page 378

AI Interpretation

GPT

This second `Short Stories` page repeats the story-seed inventory, reinforcing how memory, sex, death, children, music, disturbance, and class keep reassembling as the speaker's private anthology.

Cleaning the OCR makes it clear that this is a repeated catalogue rather than a corrupt variant. The duplication itself matters: these narrative titles keep returning to the surface.

Claude

'''Second pass at 'Short Stories' -- same thirty title-lines to Dennis Lienemann. Minor spellings shift ('Byes on the mat,' 'Imee on the cement'). A redacted or unfinished table-of-contents for a life.'''