You Don't Leave It on the Side of the Road
       

Only the skunk
(who is precious in the sight
of the Almighty,
for His first-fingers marked its back
like you'd stroke a cat's)—

that piss-kitty
just humping across the road
headed for what egg-breaking
or cricket hunting
it does in the night—

when the tire finds it and the wheel,
(the bump too small to be a body
broken but it was), raises up
a smell from earth to heaven
like a mortal soul
clinched for the longest time
to the ankle of its death.

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Copyright © 2018 Valerie Nieman All rights reserved
from Leopard Lady
Press 53
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission