Page 4 - GRANADA

2
ODE TO ALL THE ROADKILL
by Evan Martinez
after Ada Limón
I wonder what your families must think when you don’t come home. Do they lose their minds like mine would? I hope they find peace in your smell slithering around the home, wayward spirits cast back from the Other world to catch holy tears before they reach damned ground. Downtrodden, diseased, dismembered, like you, by smoking rubber, by appointments that can’t
be missed, by pilots of spacecrafts tempted by cosmic stutter-stops, forgo, forget all you’ve known
and imagine how it feels to be crushed by something so big
and uncaring that it names
you all with its own actions.
What did you do? Where?
I killed. On the road.
I imagine a little procession
content warning: violence, animal death