The news got it wrong. It wasn't four cars
involved, but one, shredded so completely
it looked like four, spread like a junkyard on
the Moravia Road overpass above the Harbor
Tunnel Throughway. What the news omitted
for the poet to report was how a human being
approached the accident from the express toll
lanes, reveling in a convenience that felt built
for him that night, zero traffic at rush hour, no
speed traps, clear December Monday evening's
last light fading behind earth’s western curve,
seeing first one, then more sets of red-blue and
yellow-red lights flashing, becoming a flotilla
of police and rescue vehicles glittering like a
galaxy, stretching across the bridge as the mile
shrank between his moment of reverie and a
cop directing a procession of cars past a body
on the frozen pavement covered by a lumped,
white ambulance blanket, a small drift of snow
beside red metal, plastic, and bent wheel smeared
and coagulated like a jagged scab across jersey
wall, shoulder, and two lanes, while slumped
medics stood, waiting for a coroner to collect
this ruin of a life next to a parked fire truck.
What the news got right was one dead. Moving
through the scene, the poet noticed the solemn
calm of traffic squeezed off two highways
into one lane on a city parkway, blaring horns
hushed by thoughts of the person on the bridge
under that blanket, their family still a phone call
away from devastation, the insistent splendor
of the universe just then poking through the
darkness, one lonely, cold, distant star at a time.
An editor with Loch Raven Review, Matt Hohner (MFA, Naropa University) has published two collections: At the Edge of a Thousand Years, winner of the 2023 Jacar Press Poetry Book Contest (April 2024), and Thresholds and Other Poems (Apprentice House 2018). He has held two residencies at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, with one forthcoming at Anam Cara in Ireland. His publications include Prairie Fire, Rattle: Poets Respond, Takahē, New Contrast, Narrative Magazine, Poetry Ireland, Prairie Schooner, The Baltimore Review, and elsewhere.