Double Exposure: Short Drives

Sarah Peecher

The day of the truck crash, someone drove me to church,

A few days before the new year, I saw a fox

in my arms the teddy bear the firefighters gave me,

carrying a rabbit in its mouth as it crossed the asphalt

it had been raining, which is why we hydroplaned

your dad’s headlights caught its dusty terracotta fur

a word I learned much later, as my dad diagrammed the accident

it felt like an omen – what does a fox with a rabbit mean?

the sun was shining as I entered the hall of the church

I thought it might mean we’d eat well this year

every day after that, whenever I rode in the car,

though it reminded me how, once, a rabbit got stuck

I hyperfocused on the tilt of the fuzzy backseat under me

in the fence of our garden and strangled there

I often gripped the notch in the door or my seatbelt

I saw it the next morning, tried not to look too closely

as the car lurched on the country roads near home

though I had become used to the small dead things

and there’s a hazy memory where I told my mom

my cats hunted, then scattered across the back deck

to drive safely, and she told me to calm down.

Sarah Peecher is a poet living and working in Chicago. She holds a Creative Writing MFA degree from Columbia College Chicago and was a Nathan Breitling Poetry Fellow. Her poem, “Wayfinding,” won the Allen & Lynn Turner Commencement Poetry Competition. Her other recent work appears in Allium: A Journal of Poetry & Prose, Bluestem, The Lincoln Review, and more. When she’s not writing, you can usually find her obsessing over her container garden.