I learned to circulate car air
on rural Georgia backroads
or dead raccoon like shaved rubber
and raw sausage will heat the AC.
I call it weed or skunk. You call it
something you can’t remember.
You’re not in a hurry to. I imagine
you’d call it half dead fish on pier boards,
smacking it to sleep. Or lazy stinking creek.
Or maybe bird feathers, high
and gray and triumphant.
Maybe you’d call it younger wonder years,
splayed out on hot pavement, grease
and gravel on Achilles heel, leeches
on your calves, and ticks behind your ears.
But back then it smelled like mushrooms
and cedar and mossy water, how bark
canoes pass under rope swings.
When the smell is gone and the hush of trees
hit chug of truck to drone me to sleep, you wipe
bugs off the windshield so I won’t see them.
I imagine it all sits like pebbles
in your mind, wet and unassuming. Dead
bugs, dead raccoons, and how I don’t like
dead things. I’d move worms off concrete
and throw hooked fish back to make it go
away, but for you, it’s all one big life.