The Average Driver Will Be in a Car Accident Once Every Eighteen Years

The Average Driver Will Be in a Car Accident Once Every Eighteen Years

The Average Driver Will Be in a Car Accident Once Every Eighteen Years

Copy Link
Facebook
X (Twitter)
Bluesky
Pocket
Email

 

Moonship comes when I’m on the road,
A/C on, music on, the inside

still in, then—zam—wind, unshielded crescents
of moon, the body gone, tearing through

space at 60 miles per hour. A green grape,
slender skin, the way every

body must be. Goose-egg on my head,
shards on my face like stars,

she didn’t mean me harm when she turned her body
from the Tollway to look at her baby. Who means

the other harm? The self, so soft. The car, a skin
across the self. Did you expect today to pay a toll

to the sky? Once my friend was hit
terribly and feared it was just the dress rehearsal

for what was coming. Imagine
a long truck dragging behind it the future. Pay.

Pay a single pound
of your body, spine to skirt, rib to rib to rib.

An ex who loved me a little but in the end not
enough teased that all my poems end with love and oh gods

of glass, gods of blacking out and coming back—
may it be so. My love, my one and only love

said she wished upon herself instead the hit.
In a perfect world,

we are all each other
all the time. It isn’t perfect now.

But isn’t she me and give me strength, I am she,
turning around facing my child.

Support The Nation’s June Fundraising Campaign

With the midterm elections now firmly upon us, the question is whether Democratic candidates will do more than merely occupy ballot lines as mild alternatives to the red-hot crisis that is Donald Trump.

As Trump spends over $1 billion a day on a globally destabilizing war on Iran and admits that he doesn’t “think about Americans’ financial situation,” millions across the country are struggling with the surging costs of essentials. Democrats must seize this moment and advance bold, small-“d” populist ideas—not settle for cynical caution that once again snatches defeat from the jaws of victory.

The Nation elevates progressive ideas, movements, and elected officials achieving real change across the country into the national conversation. At the same time, our journalists are exposing how crypto and AI-funded super PACs are spending hundreds of millions of dollars to knock out candidates they oppose, reporting on the devastating impact of the Supreme Court’s evisceration of the Voting Rights Act, and sounding the alarm on attempts by red states to quickly redraw electoral maps, disenfranchising Southern Black voters.

We can play this critical role because of support from readers like you. This June, we’re raising $20,000 to power The Nation’s independent journalism in the run-up to November’s immensely consequential elections.

It’s in our power to build a more just society, and your support at this critical moment brings us closer to that bold vision. I hope you’ll donate today.

Onward,

Katrina vanden Huevel
Editor and Publisher, The Nation

x