The Dead Body on the Highway

It was the second one we saw within a week,

covered with plastic like spring plants at night.

Covered like a canary cage to allow us to sleep.

It looked the same as the other one.  Stoic.

Cruelly indifferent.

Dead stalks of corn yet to be burned into the earth

collected the frozen breath.  Barns held up by crutches.

The body might as well have been a moth fluttering

by our eyes on our way to somewhere else.  Do you remember

where we were going?  I do.  It was dark.  We were early

with another hundred miles to go.

I brought no change of clothes.  You brought

a book, a thick Russian novel you’ve been wanting

to read for years.  Your belly stuffed with typed words.

The lights spun off behind us like tracer bullets.

You said twice in one week didn’t bother you.

You could have been speaking about a childhood pet.

Did this make you cold?  No.

It was a world you could no longer walk through,

but around.  Even snow gets weary of being snow.

We measured our loneliness by mile markers.

Both of us gifts we wanted

To return for the money.

Dustin Nightingale

Barnwood poetry magazine