New Orleans, 1978

A single, fly-specked lightbulb
signaled my approach to home,
as I returned from a fancy outing
in the French Quarter.

My date dropped me off,
gave me twenty bucks,
and didn’t even attempt a pass.

“You shouldn’t have to live like this,”
he said before he drove away.

Miles from my doorstep,
the bayou pulsated like a lost heart.
Wealthy people devoured Cajun food,
washed it down with fifty-dollar bourbon,

and gazed at the brackish Mississippi,
as it meandered it way towards the Gulf.

Early that night, too warm for a jacket,
I shivered in the darkness of Pat O’Brien’s,
surrounded by packs of callow preppies
and buckets of cheap beer.

Clutching my overpriced Hurricane,
I tried my hardest to belong.

The carport overflowed
with sports cars and Cadillacs,
driven by first-year Tulane students.

Old Southern money oozed from each pore,
stank up the room like cologne.

If I wished hard enough,
perhaps I could take flight,
soar through the magnolia trees like a peacock,

but home offered no succor—
just a windowless room and single mattress,
with the promise of one more night’s rest

Leah Mueller‘s work is published in Rattle, Best Small Fictions, Certain Age, Writers Resist, The Shallot, NonBinary Review, Brilliant Flash Fiction, New Flash Fiction Review, Does It Have Pockets, Outlook Springs, Your Impossible Voice, etc. She has received several nominations for Pushcart and Best of the Net. Her fourteenth book, “A Pretty Good Disaster,” was published by Alien Buddha Press in 2025. Check out more of her work at substack.com/@leahsnapdragon.