My old friend, Pearl,<\/p>\n
lifts a licked finger to gauge the wind\u2019s direction<\/p>\n
and begins to run, to stoke air into flame<\/p>\n
with legs muscular as a steam engine\u2019s pistons.<\/p>\n
Running is what she knows, that<\/p>\n
and the vows we swore as children, the hiss of a knife<\/p>\n
drawn across two wrists, twin red snakes<\/p>\n
uncoiled from veins to touch forked tongues<\/p>\n
ever so lightly, to taste oaths<\/p>\n
written in blood. She never blamed her father, nor mother<\/p>\n
who advised her to run and hide outside their shack<\/p>\n
until he collapsed into a drunken stupor, a railroad man<\/p>\n
who disappeared one day where the rails<\/p>\n
join at the horizon, that juncture where sky meets earth<\/p>\n
and a train, a ghost train moreover, stops<\/p>\n
and opens its door to let you board. The last time I saw her<\/p>\n
she claimed a train passed her open window<\/p>\n
on the twelfth floor at the same time each night<\/p>\n
and true to her word she boarded it not three weeks later,<\/p>\n
a sleeping compartment no less, the mind<\/p>\n
feeling its way free of a life lived on the wrong side of the tracks..<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
My old friend, Pearl, lifts a licked finger to gauge the wind\u2019s direction and begins to run, to stoke air into flame with legs muscular as a steam engine\u2019s pistons. Running is what she knows, that and the vows we swore as children, the hiss…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":998,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-31592","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-miscellaneous"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31592","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/998"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31592"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31592\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":33347,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31592\/revisions\/33347"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31592"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31592"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31592"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}