She walks her dog in a public park
across the street from her community college
every Thursday after class lets out.
Today she miscalculates the weather
and wears jeans too dense for the humid air.
The ions on her skin are upset about it.
They push and shove and swell against each other,
expanding their angry heat. Felt fibers hook barbs
in the back of her thighs and press pools
of perspiration into the mouths of her sticky pores.
She hauls her protest back to the parking lot
and praises whatever power left it empty.
Lazy fingers of sweat have already coiled
their way up her torso and hang thick around her neck.
As if the pants were poison, desperately she peels them
away from her damp skin, and sits in her driver’s seat
naked and nervous from the waist down.
She drives a winding road home and sings radio tunes
to the dog, as torrents of tepid air fan her flustered
flesh.
Until half way home, she sees in the road
a tuft of fractured wings. She jerks the wheel
and checks the mirror, in hopes she did not hit it.
She sees the body, still alive in the street –
It’s presence so tired and timid.
Her heartstrings cry out, they petition and pray.
So she rolls her eyes, and heaves a great sigh,
and pulls a U-turn in a stranger’s driveway.
Still panting and pant-less, she parks her Chevy
across the street from the dying fowl.
She looks at the creature, and she looks at her legs,
and she looks at her jeans – still damp and discarded
and inside-out, on the floor of her passenger’s seat.
She shakes her head and grits her teeth and begins
to coax the pants back onto her body.
The fabric is heavy, it spits and refuses. It bunches
and chokes, and puffs out it’s belly.
She’s parked out front of an Indian woman’s
yard and the owner watches from her lawn,
as this young woman, sweating and cursing,
tries to put her pants back on.
The buttons are not quite fastened, and her belt hangs far
from it’s loop, when she flings her car door open,
to save the dying goose. But just as her feet swing out past the
threshold,
a shiny new Prius hums up the road.
The driver is cautious and sees her parked to the side,
so slowly drifts sideways (as not to collide).
And as if in slow motion, she watches him inch closer
to the mangled game, she’s so desperate to save.
And finally they meet, as tires sew feathers to tar,
and she knows in that instant, the bird might have lived,
had she chosen (anywhere) elsewhere to park her car.
