~ Delta Poetry Review ~

Jim Daniels

Road Kill, Canada, 1971

Biking from Windsor to Montreal

we had not anticipated

the stench of dead flesh up close

and personal, through all the farms

and forests in-between

on roadside nowhere.

We smelled it coming, nothing

to do except ride on through

in the slo-mo of cycling, our bikes

loaded with the heavy bad packing

of clueless teenagers too young

to be the clueless teenagers dying

in Vietnam, escaping our dull Detroit

lives, passing roadside hippies hitching

to escape with their lives. We could not

hold our breath long enough, but almost

was miraculous, compared to what

we’d had the luxury of neglecting.

My boy scout pack, stiff and blood-

less, strapped on the carrier.

The dead animals all smelled the same.

After a dead while they even looked

the same. Giving the peace sign to the dead

was pointless. We had one more year

of high school, then the rest of our lives

to make sense of it. Cars and trucks zoomed

past, windows rolled up against it.

They spoke another language in Montreal.

A couple of American kids having their first

big adventure. One time a pedal fell off.

Another time an escalator ripped my jeans

off. We were so brave. Oh Canada!

blossoming enormous around us,

even Canada, living with the stench

of the wind blowing north.

Jim Daniels’s latest book, The Luck of the Fall, fiction, was published by Michigan State University Press. Recent poetry collections include The Human Engine at Dawn, Wolfson Press; Gun/Shy, Wayne State University Press; and Comment Card, Carnegie Mellon University Press. His first book of nonfiction, “Ignorance of Trees,” is forthcoming from Cornerstone Press. A native of Detroit, he currently lives in Pittsburgh and teaches in the Alma College low-residency MFA program.