Some lines...

From a short story by Phil Grayson, sometime Q contributor and local descendant, soon to be published in the literary magazine Aloud (links to come)...

"If you walk west from Avenue B late at night, you have to swim, but eventually you can get to the desert. Tack a bit south.

"The smoke comes up blue and nicotine, the blue manes of lions beneath the bonewhite moon at night, blowing upward in the strange African wind, looking westward always westward, toward the unseen plains so far beyond, where grasshoppers leap and fly and fall and leap again in the tall yellow grass and the perfect blue sky broken only by the burning sun, as yellow and summer as the tall yellow grass,leapt toward by grasshoppers, buzzing in their futile wings, only happy, always again to be airborne as they fall.

"They kiss and he leaves and walks south for one block, then in a straight line to the west, the hum of the highway there, the lights of New Jersey weak and muted like the lights of Juarez, beyond the river."