Descriptive poem, by Christina Woodson, no use of this work permitted without written consent

When dogs and cats litter the streets,

In smithereens that look like the most rotten tomatoes mixed in with the cracking tar on the hot Los Angeles road,

I know the empire is going to fall, shattered to the floor like millions of mirrors leaving no room to spare anyone. 

Maybe I never knew just how many animals get hit by cars, mangled and tangled and tossed like a meat grinder.

But now I notice and I see the numbers, 

Too many to remember. 

Rats, dogs, cats, babies, and my uterus,

All lining the streets where I drive

Through a hellish industrial wasteland that David Lynch could not have created. Snow falling that is the ash of the mountains up the coast burning down.

The older I get,

The hotter the sun becomes,

My eyes begin to phase the golden filter out, but probably only because they’re melting into my skull. 

The land is grey and bleak, but mostly brown,

And the dogs and cats and rats line the street. 

And maybe I just never noticed, but now that I do, it’s too many.

And that’s when you know when the empire is crumbling. 

When dogs, cats, rats, uteruses, and babies

They are getting run repeatedly with no one to clean up, and no street cleaning has a hose strong enough to shred the blood and guts up. They save those hoses for protests that ask for a better quality of life. 

The dead meat becomes hard as tumors on the concrete,

Smushed and crushed by the weight of quarter-full tanks,

Because why would we care about these animals? 

Maybe I never noticed how many dogs and cats and rats,

Get hit and repeatedly hit on the streets,

But now that I see I can not ignore it. 

When the sun sets over LA,

And I dodge a mutilated thing, 

I wonder what its name was. 

It has no name to people,

No one cares enough, because

When it doesn’t have a name it doesn’t matter. 

Days and days, there’s no one to sweep the animals,

Because this is an empire falling apart. 

We abandon our animals because we abandon each other, leaving terrible glares in the grocery store. Coming out of the darkness of a pandemic that turned us cruel and evil and mean. 

And it was the job of the power to clean it up and keep us nice,

To make sure our mind was squeaky clean and our eyes shut,

The people who hit Spike and Ginger were few and not often. 

But they’re showing us in the dirty, unsaved, unsavory, streets,

With dogs and cats and rats and unborn babies and uteruses,

We are all alone. Though there is no more space in Los Angeles, we are all alone. Probably, if I were being mutilated, my neighbor who does not know my name would call for help seven hours later. But not before, because she or he or they are scared because they too are all alone. 

We are the babies, mutilated and our innocence taken,

We are the uteruses, raped and pulled apart,

We are the cats, dogs, and rats. 

To them, we are never far from roadkill,

We are never far,

And this is an empire falling apart. 

Because when people hit road kill,

Numb as the road kills clumpy chunks,

They don’t care anymore. 

And maybe I didn’t notice, how much we are just pets to the powers,

But now that I’ve seen it,

I can’t close my eyes anymore. 

So on a Sunday, when the sun is hot, and you get upset remembering the despair Sunday brought you as a child,

I will walk the streets naked, 

And scrape up the road kill while the bullets that pierce my skin tell me to stop being radical,

Ethical,

Moral,

Graceful.