I’m holding the theater door open
for a stream of expensive coats.
The one who grants me passage argues,
You are too nice for your own good.
I respond by telling him about that time I hit
a raccoon one midnight last September –
the force of the front bumper, the blood
blooming from blue fur like early cherry buds.
Have you ever killed something with your own car,
sir? It changes a man. I growl at him while wildly
gnawing an imaginary toothpick. He moves
away from me then because
I am something other than nice.
He knows that now. What he doesn’t know
is the weight of a raccoon heart when placed
against my own, the headlights,
like his whiskered eyes, golden, and then
eternally blank, the need I felt to lay the body
down in a halo of raspberry bushes.
Photo By: Fated Snowfox
