Austin Kodra is an MFA candidate at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. Kodra’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Concho River Review, Mason's Road, Barnstorm, Prime Number Magazine, and elsewhere. ---------
Woman Killed after Crashing Stolen Cop Car
Interstate 75, Bradley County, TN
We are so close to the convergence
of what is sacred and what has collapsed.
At mile marker 22, in the median,
in the gap between tongues of asphalt,
two boys howl for their mother
from the dark muscle of their lungs.
We brake to a crawl but do not stop.
The boys wade waist-deep in grass
that hooks at its tips like question marks.
Mouths hinged wide, the boys are birds
that cannot yet feed themselves.
We do not know then that they
have just watched their mother stab
the officer, wave a knife like a wand,
and disappear in his car, shots ringing,
popping against the car’s body
as she speeds off, as she makes her choice
that is not them.
We are here, in this moment
of such great suffering.
We can almost reach from our windows.
We can almost touch their faces.
Concussed
Five Saturdays he was lifted, driven to the turf,
skull-shook—five times he stumbled off the field,
dazed, forgetting to raise a finger to the Lord
in that thunderous bowl nudging the river.
We, the college crowd, drunk on whiskey and heat
and wanting everything to hinge on each slant
and post, claimed all of it as ours.
Now, a few years after his brush with hometown fame,
he and I swing by the liquor store for a case
of something cheap and silver. He insists on paying,
insists we should hang out more, says he loves me.
No homo; like a brother. The machine declines his card
and unable to stop himself, he calls the cashier a cunt,
loud enough for the store to ripple quiet and heavy,
the word a stone sinking to a riverbed.
The cashier is wide-eyed, almost amused,
and a young woman searching bottom-shelf vodka
peers over the aisles at the counter.
He slaps down a twenty, scoops up the case
in one graceful motion and is out the door before
another word can break the silence.
I know he doesn't want to explain himself again,
that all he'd say is You just saw for yourself,
and I can't ask him what's happening
because we were never really that close.
Once, he said to me on the phone that God
had tested his faith and spirit with the traumas.
I close my eyes and see him, a hawk, floating
across the middle in front of a hundred thousand. I imagine
his highlight reel, those moments of bat-shit elation,
and I think how a city of voices
praising his name might coincide with belief.
A few blocks down, we find an empty curb, pop
open a couple. I ask him what I can—
if it was worth it, to be broken so quickly.
Never been asked that, he says,
crumpling the first can in his palm.
But yeah, I wouldn't change a thing.