Headlights too late
illuminate 12 points
growing skyward.
Torn earth and frayed tires fume
up and away from warm-blooded nostrils;
hot crippled car;
the in-out-in-out pace of mammal
breathing from the night-time road.
Later, others arrive
they go about their business of
calling, towing, reporting
then leave.
All but one.
This man had loved the woman driving.
Once
on a perfect day
she had cut open his heart
with a surgeon’s precision
to let the world in.
He moved the lumbering weight of dead buck
to his truck-bed,
drove the silence of recently fallen home,
sharpened his knife to a fine edge, and
with surgeon’s precision
cut the body open.
Slowly, artfully, he cut
the venison into dinner-size packages and
stored them in his freezer.
He spent one year waiting,
as he had read was proper,
and then sometimes in company, sometimes alone
he ate that memory.
© antonia small