Stick Up/Stuck Up

   The apartment building was on the alley side of boulevard and perpendicular to the train rails.  Taller people would stand on the street corner and piggyback people into open windows. 

  We were earning the maybe enough cab fare home by sewing outfits, "designing" neck ties, and doing chores for "shut ins".  We got to go to the pharmacy, and the butcher for others and smell fried food smells except when trains went by and the air would get stirred and unstank.

  One brother in his Ranger hat kept smelling the gum wrappers to un-smell being buried alive.  Another had drag marks on his arms and legs.  But we were all together again, mostly. 

  "We are." 

  "We're going to get through this." 

  One wife with bird claw hands fluffed the crushed flat wheel of roses, "little silkies" on the wool coat's lapel. 

 "This time," someone read the lips of someone under a lightpole.

  "We have to try," the egyptian boy put forehead to each of ours.  We squeezed each others' hands to start "the pulse".

  The clash of the titanesque wAs gearing up.

  In metropoli worldwide we'd readied.

  Grappling hooks swung us from land to Sea, and back again to 

     yonders and 

          fallow

  Paled rainbow colors hung in Our skies on Planet Earth separating us from Outer Space.

  "I guess some newspaper articles in some blenders

  "Got confused?

....... 

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     The zombies were twirling levers's worths of quarters to power locomotives and races involving horses.  We Getty groups had to beg, begger, and in some cases beggar coins for newspapers, coffee, and socks.

  It was 1978 and shortage was plentiful.  We were just a series of states divided and re-divided amongst nations United and gambled away.  By our flags, the dawn's early light was flotsam'd and foggish.

  Whatever had come ashore to collect the "shell" that had left that size divet, well, had been followed by a cast on Broadway and a Press.  Forty hours later we were ready to move out, the trains on that point.  Montauk, he thought it was.

  "Then it's not our county," a Parish person explained.  "Does anyone have a map?" Was the question that went around in the dark while we were waiting and waiting to go.  Our mom had given us all a piece of Wrigley's.  Other kids had found "ABC" (already been chewed) gum and other castoffs on bathroom breaks in the little underpass nearby.  But that caused an au pair to panic when she couldn't wake some children.

  We would've lost track of the days but we used a New York Times crossword puzzle that people taking a turn staying awake wrote the hours down on.  A man in a baseball jacket thought he might take a look see how far other tracks might be from ours.  A lady in slacks helped designate a smoking car.  And when all the whiskey sour breaths had stumbled from a local pool hall to a dining car a shadowy figure looking like a leap frog put fingers in his mouth and whistled.  The sound was even and strong and the loud just above dog whistle.  At first.  Others on down the line also whistled the tune through the bramble alongside the tracks.  

  Before purple-ing skies a smallish car delivered newspapers to a stand not far from that apartment building's corner street lamp.  A tall man already reading one wiggled his re-folded and put it under an arm of his leather jacket and put his copy in front of the new stack.  A wandering wino bumped into him and dusted off the man's arm in his blazer.  Then he pantomimed hiccups and bubbles and woozy head.  Someone else put a lightswitch box slug in the quarter slot. 

  Finally a clancyman in a top hat and old timey circus cape came on the tracks with the loud boy all tied up in little Bo Peep clothes and white rope over his jeans and sneakers.  He was laying stiff across the clancyman's owl perch but it looked like he was strapped to his shoulders with a big "X". 

     "He's the one," a younger girl whisper told an older girlfriend.  Last seen? 

  We'd been in the back of a different train car so when and where we saw our lost boys before we got split up was important enough to get a sip of OJ.

  This one's called Last Seen....

     It really was a warm summer's evening and we'd had a mystery on an express.  "Pass me the paragraphs," they asked while the coneheads watched.  "Ain't gotta licka

Sense /. / Cents

Pica?

          A light rap on a lav door.  "No, that's the loo mate." 

  She'd reluctantly been to Vietnam again though her family now residing in 

The big Mitt  /.  /. Michigan

     The fishnetted stuffed animal fluff leg had deflated our toys but fashioned a special lamp base.