Runaway Song (Audio Track)

 
 
  

Rollover Crash Carrying Pigs

They scatter sweetly, confused
while frank sunlight washes them in gold and red.
Casting a porcine sheen over the jam of cars, vans, and rigs
is the rollover crash carrying pigs.

Where to go in the maze of straw, oil
and blood? How to live?
Through this disaster, this big cosmic gig
of the rollover crash carrying pigs.

Scrambling they root for kin or calm
as in the unjointed time
of the wake of the shock—
some insupportable news,

a swift deep cut nicking bone—
when the laughing squeal of despair
writhes in the brain’s rent pen:
that rollover crash carrying pigs.

We’ll remember it as stilled hooves,
an edged barnyard scent,
an unease with the pure pain of innocents.
Yet like the news hour’s lost, last year’s hospice pass

from the other side of the highway
the pause doesn’t last.
Onlookers creep past the mess while you dig
through your rollover crash carrying pigs.

 
 
Box of Elephants

We live with a tiny herd
each the size of a tea cup and tumbling

past our bowls at breakfast, I dream.
They tip at our feet in twos and threes,

tripping the dogs, moving around
and under, they seems to float over us,

a grey and jubilant weather.
When I wake in the eggplant-purple

dream-night and touch the bedside box
where they stand body-to-body,

a dozen crime-dark eyes gaze back,
blinking coolly. Offspring of what

stormy vision, what premonition?
Mornings I lie spent,

one hanging back at the edge
of the open notebook, shyly skimming

her trunk along my thumb,
caressing where the flesh meets pen.
 

 
Josie Raney is the author of American Vignette,
published by Tia Chucha Press in 2004. A recipient
of a Fulbright Fellowship and The Guild Complex’s
Emerging Poet Fellowship, she lives with her husband
Josh in Chicago, where she does a little of this and a
little of that. She can be contacted at
josieraney@hotmail.com.