When It Happened Poem by Seamus O' Brian

Our headlights push the darkness through
the s-shaped coils of pavement
threading through the sawgrass flats
across the mangrove estuaries
with their inky black wetness
fingering the edges of the road.

"How's school going? "

My brother asks
as he strains forward
in the driver's seat, peering
into the darkness that is pushing
back against the windshield.

"This is your last year, right? "

The mother hunches her pain
over the tightly grasped hand
of her daughter, hiding her eyes
from the three inches of stainless
steel needle hovering over the small
back heaving with sobs.

My gloved fingers trace the braille
of her spine, reading the invitation
of the spaces and the warning of the
submerged vertebral pilings before
I plunge the shaft through the feverish
embers of her skin into the subterranean
pool of spinal fluid below. Her mother's cries are
lost in her screams.

"Uh, pretty good, I guess. Getting through."


A flash of brown is catapulted
from the black edge of night
into the dazzling, insect-laced
stagelights of the car for
the briefest drama the denouement
of which is proclaimed by the lurching
thud of both axles, and the
shuddering caterwaul
of brakes, applied too late.

The engine ticks, the hazards click
their indifferent amber metronome,
but the humid blackness of the everglades
has reclaimed everything but the thin
shaft of a flashlight penciling
over the spasms of a speckled fawn
broken on the pavement.

"It's still alive" my brother suggests.
"What do we do? "

My hand navigates the jagged
coastline of its fractured spine,
fingers wander over the bright markings
of this furry haversack of bleeding organs.
And I am somewhere else.

"His pressure's dropping, "announces
the surgical tech next to me,
but I am immobilized, helplessly
tethered to the reality that I am cradling
a skull whose tectonics are shifting
in my grasp like the broken shell
of a softly boiled egg. Gelatinous tan
oozes through my fingers, and as I step over it
I wonder how long it took the janitor
in this unit to become
unfazed by brain matter.

I bring the tire iron down full force
just behind the rolled-back terror
of the eyes of the fawn, and it twitches
twice more before my second blow
returns the silence of the night
to the soft buzz of the insects
intrigued by the glow of the trunk light.

I glance up at the cavern of silence
my brother has become, and the
expression of horror in his
eyes that mirror a blood-spattered
monster flickered by the metronome
of the hazards, setting the tire iron
back in the trunk.

No, I'm not quite sure when it happened.