The Torn-Up Road @the-torn-up-road - Tumblr Blog

An American Gods playlist [listen] [download] (photo credit)

1. Clouds Moving In || Beat Circus 2. Fingers to the Bone || Brown Bird 3. St. James Infirmary || Tumbledown House 4. 16 Tons || Tennessee Ernie Ford 5. Springtime Can Kill You || Jolie Holland 6. Things That Scare Me || Neko Case 7. You’re Nobody When Nobody Loves You || The Mills Brothers 8. Ran So Hard the Sun Went Down || Otis Taylor 9. Far Away || Jose Gonzales 10. Gun Street Girl || Tom Waits 11. Christ Condemned to Death || New York Hymns 12. If I Ever Leave This World Alive || Flogging Molly 13. Farthest Shore || Blitzen Trapper

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I want my longing to miraculously bring you through the barrier of your skin into my blood so that I can possess you entirely and yet be entirely possessed. You say no, your face tight with pain, tears burning your eyes, hands clenching the steering wheel. I believe you. We drive hundreds of miles across deserts sculpted by wind and story, and I learn distance from my hand to your thigh, your mouth to my mouth, the curve of a collar along a warm, smooth neck. You grin as if no one has ever seen you thus: naked, savage, happy. That is the beginning of yes.

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–Deborah A. Miranda, Old Territory. New Maps. (excerpt)

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“O I guess it wasn’t that different from entering A thousand other American towns, but this one Made my flesh crawl. I wanted to howl. The men walked with their hands deep in their pockets. The women were afraid to lift their eyes. It was as if something terrible had happened Or was about to happen.”

— from Provo by Mark Rudman

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The Duffel Bag

God’s blood beads on the tarmac and something rough is boiling up just this side of the vanishing point, so it’s probably time to get off this stretch of blacktop and into the wayside bar, where every cup runneth over and you breast a thickening fret of stogie smoke to get to the dank back room where a high stakes game turns against you despite your trey of jacks, and soon enough you’re in way over your head with nothing and no one to blame but the luck you’ve been getting since first you threw your stuff into a duffel bag and hooked up with the halt and lame, with the grifters and drifters, the die-hards, the masters of bluff, the very bastards, in fact, who are lifting the last of your stash… So it’s into the crapper and out through the window—you’re free to do whatever you must, so long as that purple-and-yellow blush in the sky doesn’t mean what it seems, so long as that lick of flame from the hard-shoulder spillage doesn’t travel as far as the scree of garbage in the lay-by, so long as that’s not your name in the red top front-page splash on the trailer-trash kidnappee… Just keep to the shadow-side, keep in under the lee of roadside billboards, bed down in the roadside scrub, your dream of Ithaca, that ghost town, though the rest is mystery— what brought you to this and who might take the blame, and how to get from the open road to a sight of the open sea.

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-David Harsent