Tonight's Poet Corner: Witness To An Accident
Witness To An Accident by Belinda Roddie I am not waiting for the traffic light to change. There's a pile-up on the shoulder, and the road's running wild red, wild red, wild red, like an animal wounded on a field of black and white - it's like photography in motion, but also stopped like a premature heartbeat. Let me keep driving - so I don't have to see the sagging body bags - so I don't have to hear the keening banshees clinging to the roofs of police cars as their stoic metal faces grin sheepishly against the asphalt - so I don't have to feel the metaphorical boa constrictor wrap around my chest and attempt to suffocate me with my own primal emotions and latent fear of death. No, officer, I don't know why you pulled me over. I was in the middle of an anxiety attack in which I was questioning my own miserable mortality while some schmuck was crammed into a sack even though the blood was still wet in his eye sockets, and al