A bit of bread to bind us
Tipped coffees, tripped feet
Laughter forced and flowing
Fed us
Unto bursting,
And when ruptured made us one
Again
Fingers twined and hearts forgetting
Borrowed beds and lost sight dreams
Life limped on and
Years became us, ours, multiplying
Needs... crept in
Like pain filled heart beats
Cutting close our once freed feet
A bit of bread that bound us
Binds us
Swallowed in a moment’s gleam.
Forgot my chain mail
Left off my sword
Waded clumsily to battle
With naught, but words...
Bent down to prostrate
I bared my neck
For your beheading
Bared my back
For your abuse
Laid down my pride
To better heave the burden
Of your sanguine forgetting
And lap the low lament of
My exhaled truth
With shield cocked
For prime deflecting
Helmet lowered and chest plate shined
You took no note of love’s last leaving
Nor the long prized smile in my eyes.
Sunshine felt a clank, and a crunch, and a crash in her heart. Her hand had reached forward for the smiling woman on the cell phone, but her body had leapt backward. Apparently, her self preservation instinct had finally decided to kick in.
“Oh my god!” cried the woman on the road. The driver, who’d run a red light and barreled through the crosswalk, rolled down his window.
“Did I hit someone?” he asked Sunshine as she whipped out her phone.
“Yeah you fucking did. I’m calling 911,” she yelled back leaning over the woman on the ground. “Stay down, are you okay, no no don’t stand up.”
“I’m just gonna move the car,” the driver offered, still from inside the vehicle, disregarding the injured woman who had only a moment ago been prone against his windshield.
“What?!” Sunshine yelled. “Where are you going?”
“I’m just gonna move the car, down the street a bit. There’s a parking lot.”
Sunshine stood in front of the car, the other woman having been moved off the street by a volunteer firefighter who’d witnessed the assault... as Sunshine felt it must be termed. “I need to give you his license plate number,” she interrupted the 911 operator. “He’s about to drive off.” She made eye contact with the driver and could hear the inaudible “FUCK” that was ricocheting inside his head.
He finally removed himself from the car and sauntered over to the sidewalk, avoiding looking down at his victim. “Honey,” he said into his cell phone, “you’re gonna have to check the bank balance.”
So that was that. Sunshine hated drivers, cops, and ambulances. She’d grown up in a lower working class (fancy word for poor) immigrant neighborhood. There was no such thing as a trust worthy cop. In all honestly she’d never had a “bad” encounter with a police officer. Been pulled over in friends’ cars a few times as a teenager for looking a little too Mexican. She wasn’t, but it was probably hard to tell the difference at 60 miles per hour. She’d dealt with some over eager border police and had had a few too many run ins with teams running neighborhood searches for runners. “Do not come out of your houses” the helicopters had blared through the summer nights of her childhood. Cops made her nervous. Giving police statements was a thing to be avoided. It was drilled, tattooed, into her brain. She’d always managed to avoid them until now. Break ins, beatings, parties gone bad had never resulted in statements... but this was different, she told herself waiting around for the first responder to get around to her.
“So, did he accelerate?” the handsome officer asked her, looking at her sideways as she stood rod straight.
“No, he just didn’t slow down...”
“Yeah, okay. I’ll call you if I need anything from you.”
He was nice, polite even. He seemed to think she carried some authority, was someone to be trusted. She was of course. A fully grown adult woman who didn’t lie as a rule and believed in the societal importance of rule following. But she was relieved when he didn’t call her. Relieved when he walked away.
“Driver’s think they are in some sort of bubble!” Sunshine declaimed to her friend Ruby the next day at work. “They just float around in their air conditioned, leather cushioned, radio fueled ambiance and they never think ‘I’m in a deadly weapon.’”
“True....”
”And the car industry perpetuates this!” cried Sunshine. “They do, all those adds about ‘relax and enjoy and let the car park for you.”
”Let the car park for you?”
”Yeah, those fancy cars that parallel park for the driver... if you’re too lazy to park or look behind you when you pull out then you’re too lazy to drive a god damned car.”
“Yup.” Ruby agreed, partly because Sun was clearly not in the mood for complexity of argument.
“We should have a protest!”
”A protest?”
“Yeah, the drivers here are terrible. Have you ever seen worse drivers? I lived in a country where people drink homemade alcohol out of old soda bottles while they drive and they are better than these idiots. Do they had out licenses in cracker jack boxes or something here?!”
“Umm, I don’t think so...”
“I just wish there was a way to make people more aware of how selfish and careless they are.”
”What like an Occupy Crosswalks protest?” Ruby chuckled.
“Yeah!” Sunshine leapt to her feet. “That is brilliant. An Occupy Crosswalks protest. We could get a bunch of people together and then for one hour on a specific day just block the streets by standing on the crosswalks. We’d have to have a lot of people of course.”
”I was kidding Sun...” Ruby tried to break in.
“And maybe tee shirts so people knew we were organized,” Sunshine continued undeterred. “And signs, like ‘We are the 5%’... what do you think is the percentage of people here who don’t drive?”
”Don’t you think that would just piss the drivers off more. Like the Occupy everything else protests did?”
”So what? The whole point of protests is to make people aware. To disrupt their daily routines. So what if we piss them off for one hour of their lives. Though I guess we would have at least one person who would just drive through the protest line. But hey, that would certainly get us national news coverage! A martyr for the cause!”
“Okay, now you’ve got to be kidding me. Have you lost your mind?” Ruby asked with a horrified expression from over the cube wall that separated their work spaces.
“Yeah, okay... I just wish we could do something.”
