7 Billboards and Street Signs I Did Not See As I Drove Across 5 States
1.
Caution!
Bridge ices
when you show it fear.
2.
The Time Is: 11:31 p.m.
Do not call your mother.
3.
This motel is closed for the season.
The season is over.
Vacancies: Yes.
4.
Injured? Hurt? In an accident?
Was it an accident?
Are you sure
it was an accident?
5.
Danger! You Are NOT Entering New York!
6.
Objects in the mirror
are chasing you.
7.
Welcome Home.
I Imagine a Scenario Where I Collide with a Deer While Going 10 Miles Per Hour on a Skateboard
We make eye contact and, for a split second,
an argument;
“Who is the trespasser, here?”
Her thin and heaving flank
has been sculpted by starvation,
the protrusion of her ribs
like primeval river valleys—
coat bristly and in every way unsoft.
Her eyes are vacant and wild and terrified.
So strange are creatures who,
when confronted with a hurtling object,
make the choice to freeze.
Just as strange as creatures who,
when confronted with a hill and wheels,
throw themselves down it to feel the wind.
We meet, and gravity does the rest.
Cloven hoof to earth-bound temple.
Asphalt twisted into delicate palm.
The scream of creatures never meant to scream.
We are two bodies in the aftermath,
she and I. Stunned after being touched
by something we never imagined
could touch us.
I wonder, with my closed eyes,
if my twisted ankle aches
because it has turned
dark, split, and cloven.
I wonder, as the skateboard flees the scene,
what it means—that our blood mingles
on the asphalt between us.
Snow Blindness
The flakes argue for who gets to die first
on the windshield.
A million moments of obstruction
piled on and dancing.
Snow blindness happens when
you track a single tumbling snowflake
so clearly and completely
that you miss something right in front of you.
A curve in the road.
The darting gray blur of a rabbit.
Some heavy sadness, aching like a migraine—
a blink, and you’ve missed four months of living.
Daydreaming of ascension,
of cold and cold and cold,
I pull over to the side of Route 202
in a strange fit of caution.
Watch the way the light eats the asphalt.
Baptism turned communion-solid,
the snow catches in my eyelashes.
Some kind of strange blessing, the knowledge
that last year, I would not have pulled over.
I would have watched the snowflake
and missed the road.
Present but not weighted,
addition made subtraction,
I tilt my head to the milk-and-sugar sky.
Ahead of me is the road
and the entire winter.
For now, I see the snow
but not the single flakes.