That Time I Hit a Raccoon

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.