fear of streets or of crossing the street
-inspired by Jamaal May’s Phobia sequence
When I was eleven years old, Mom
asked me to go borrow two eggs
from our neighbor across
the street, and all I could think
was that cars cannot feel bodies
on their bumpers, and streets do not care
who they take with them while they slither
north or east or south on their
ways to the sea, and lanes have twin
pits like ditches that pull us away until
we reach the ocean, and the yellow
dashes down the middle should be red,
like when I ran across and the asphalt was
a stickpin on my bare feet and the blood
on my legs stroked upward not down,
and in that moment I knew that death
is a river but dying is a road
with a pit running down the middle,
bottlenecking my breath until the ditch crumbles
into a waterfall and the highway
lifting my legs feels like a forgiveness.
Photo Road by Cary Elizabeth Liberman used under Creative Commons License (by-nc-sa-2.0)
