Run on Run on Run on Sentence

Tapped her flat-soled foot on concrete until the drums of her ears dilated her eyes and the reverb shrieked and drowned weeks of sighs and bass beat touched her organs with rich earthquakes,
gentle and deep.

Smoke Gets in Your Eyes

She crept down the fire escape again, wretched in the vicious cold of morning. Glanced around one more time, the backyard was dulled, the hues broken and the white lattice arch showing its bones through dead vines. But she remembered how it had looked in September. She slunk around the back of the house, narrowly missed hitting her head on a window a/c unit, hands shoved in her pockets. Returning to exile.

A tender envy held her in rigor mortis, lockjaw of happiness.
Wood smoke languished on her pashmina and she begged it to stay.
Her pocket were full of holy relics, plain wooden pencils from pinatas and a bottle cap from a Christmas Moerlein. She laid them out on the breakfast table, little artifacts brought back through the looking glass. The taste of the beer resurrected spectres of September in a rush. With Over the Rhine on her lips, she huddled next to the fire, admiring the splendor of the assembled company as they salsaed and mamboed on the wet, cold driveway. Here it was a joy to be a fly on the wall. Ursula longed for such a family, the sort of longing that compels one to eat whitewash and dirt, the sort of longing that fills you up to your eyeballs until you puke because you can't imbibe any more of it. She slept like a baby on the futon while the wind swelled up and roared around the old house.

Switchblades Preferred

Ursula stiffed it through her shift, with a new notch in the game of resignation building in between her shoulders. He brushed her elbow with his fingers several times and she did not respond at all. Inwardly, she sneered. Setting the container carelessly onto the scale, she traced it back to the source, or as near as she could get. She thought, but didn’t say aloud, you see that line of demarcation back there by the trees? Back there, no, further still? Flirt, that’s right, go on, flirt. Joke about hooking up before you get married, and I will fake laugh and slow-burn full of rage because behind every joke is some shred of truth. Keep making passes at me under the cover of good humor and comedy. That makes it totally acceptable. Do you realize, I’m counting the hours until I will never have to see you again? Yet, sometimes it is enough to hold a set of aces in your hand. She wondered and frowned at the line of demarcation and how everyone came waltzing on over it, cool as you please, as though she’d sent them a gold-leaf invitation.

She fled early, speeding down the golden-lit business park boulevard home, the corner of her eye fixed on a frozen plume rising from one of the office complexes. Shed a layer of snake skin joyfully as soon as she got in the door and pulled the postcard from the pages of a book.
It said little. Albuquerque. She thought of heavy snow as I-40 wound through the rock and then a blaze of lights sprawling out beside and below them. She thought of the green dash lights and crimson taillights painting his features. She thought of the enormous, brilliant rising moon. It raised more questions than it answered, but its tangibility soothed. Remote, yet remembered. She wished he'd let her try to help. She hoped he didn't think she'd make things worse.
"Who told you there was no such thing as real, true, eternal love? Cut out his lying tongue!"

November Thunder

She felt the energy on her ride home.
It was going to storm tremendously.
In about an hour.
Her blood stood up and answered and she wanted a midnight adventure.
Looking from the sullen ruby cloud ceiling and the lights over the bridge, she glanced down on the glittering parking lot and saw the werewolf walking at a distance.
The wind kicked up and the paper factory on the river glowed behind the trees.
“Florescent lights engage, blackbirds frying on a wire,” she hummed.
Vertigo was building up behind her eyes like a migraine.

All over the coast

The eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg nailed her in the solar plexus and for a moment green lights at the end of docks swum before her. Smiling winningly, she breathlessly stepped past him. To her horror her heart was pounding like a panicked bird trapped in a house, making her thoughts into zeppelins colliding and tangling themselves up in their haste to stay out of reach of the gorilla scaling the tower.
At the end of the week, she revisited drives to Toledo and Detroit in winter. She marveled over how much significance a silent phone could have. So restless, she shifted through the ashes of friendships one more time. As ever, her hands shook, and her weary eyes watched the horizon of a clear sky with mistrust. The loan hadn’t come through. That was disaster enough for now. She didn’t feel like doing anything, calling anyone, eating anything. Her heart lay stunned on the ground after two bouts of beating against the windowpane in a panic. She pried an ornate silver key out of the sandy soil, embedding dirt deep under her nails. Rubbing her thumb over the pattern crest she wiped it clean. She worried she would have to pawn it. And Martin Espada knew all about pawn shops.