I remember my first death
under dim lights. A smear of fur
and utter dark on the asphalt,
life stretched and flattened onto the killing plane
described by a singular yellow lamp of
suburban wrongness. I snapped
my neck away, blood-phantom-shard-pain
of seeing something terrible in the sublime.
oof, roadkill, my father said, as if we
should be described by how our murderers
twist the knife. All night I dreamt
of vengeance and the black serrated blade
until I was tugged in by the extended arm of my mother
who did not know the new changeling
in her daughter’s body shirking the
garish daylight, helpless to alter our
sun and moon elliptical orbit. Then round the corner
with not-yet-myopic eyes I could see precisely
nothing below new buds of the imprisoned
city pear, midday wheels heaving over
a lacuna blown on the negative reel
of my mind as if maliciously
imagined. I lingered. Here was a
vanished crime scene cleared
of all wrongdoing, not even a televised
sham trial. As my head lightened into her embrace
I could hear my mother’s sinewy panic above
all else, a pietà for the unborn
and undeserving.
