Still Life in Red, White, & Blue
We lean along the fog
like Otis Redding’s airplane
On the morning of September 26, 2016, I was making my morning bike commute down Damen Ave in Chicago. I whizzed past stalled traffic, wondering why the street was uncommonly jammed, but soon noticed flashing lights in the distance. As I approached the intersection of Damen and Addison, I came across a scene that will haunt me forever. A bicyclist’s worst nightmare. A fatal accident. Everything became very quiet, very still. I got off my bike and walked it across the intersection as a cop directing traffic told me to “be careful out there.” My eye was drawn to the driver of the truck which caused the fatality. Disheveled, distraught, soiling himself. I can only imagine the trauma that he experienced and continues to experience to this day.
We lean along the fog
like Otis Redding’s airplane.
Horns honk.
Traffic is packed like
passengers on the Doña Paz.
EMTs stand and stare
into the mist
like veal calves.
A man in soiled blue jeans,
eyes rimmed red,
like the moon in Revelations,
breathing hard, receiving oxygen
in the back of an ambulance,
white as an avalanche.
The Schwinn,
like a robin’s egg
smashed flat
upon the asphalt,
something sticky,
(not quite yolk)
squeezed around it.
Nearby, a white vinyl sheet
with a cooling heap
piled beneath.
An unpluggable leak
laps against the grime.
