roadkill season
Kathy Jiang
i want to be teeth to teeth, i said yesterday. with you.
out of love, you took it as language more languid
in its absurdity than alarmingly,
routinely urgent.
when we touched
in the first year, i thought i would
bite right through your face: rabid,
carefree rabbit, unaware of the dead,
torsoed air beginning
to braid itself
between us. now, you scoff at what’s tough
and i at what’s soft, and what lands like
rotten wood within ends up strewn across the turnpike
a pair of ears still twirling on
the deer you careened right
past that curious bend of her head, the tear of a tire screeching
holy fucking shit and would it be so bad to go home
and clack ourselves together after that?
i couldn’t look.
down you came
on me, your thumb rubbing
rivets in my palm.
don’t look, then. don’t.
could i spare you
all this hardness.
in the face and in your knee,
big pupil staring at me
from the beech of your leg.
that big round iron god.
that tenderness ringing the hammer
in your childhood bed, tucking itself to sleep
as a man with no lips stood weeping in the corner,
then ordered you to get up with eyes
that stay on you even now.
Kathy Jiang is a poet and therapist from the DC area. Her work, which has been nominated for Best New Poets and received support from Brooklyn Poets and other organizations, can be found in Oxford Poetry, SWWIM, Up the Staircase, and elsewhere. She is an assistant editor at Seventh Wave and a poetry reader at The Adroit Journal.
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