Now I’m off the phone and pacing while my wife, seven states away, waits in the smashed car to relay the incident’s specifics to a bored cop at the intersection of two wide and busy roads. It’s a sunbaked Texas town where, I imagine, the woman who t-boned her sizes up the grill guard with her pea-patch husband, both of whom are already scum of the earth, idiot scum of the earth. Inattentive texting while driving scum of the earth, who were posting driving selfies or twitter polls seeking counsel on which fast food value meal they should shovel down their maws, chewing with their mouths open in the living room of what I’m sure is the saddest half a duplex in all the republic of Texas while SVU airs and they rubberneck a gruesome case. In another world, my wife is dead, her body wrecked in the wreck, and that world chaffs too close and though she’s fine, alive, shaken but fine fine fine I’m crying and say aloud, I’d kill them both, and in that moment, when just moments before I debated alone paint shades for our kitchen and asked the dogs what would be the ecological fallout if a barred owl fell in love with a red-tailed hawk, I’m pretty sure I mean it, which scares me in the way it must scare the tv star who tilts a conversion van off a crushed friend or rushes back for an heirloom when the foundation beams have already burst, flames rising from the floor like geysers, the expected feats of fear and rage, who realizes there’s another self that sleeps and, when it wakes, is more terrifying and courageous and, I see, more cruel, with a drill bit heart that turns faster and with more bite the more it hurts. Is he a necessary self? Sometimes, love is the right spring babbling, bubbling over moss, feeding meadow reeds. Sometimes, it’s an errant left turn and the sun burning down the westbound lane fracturing light through a windshield’s sheen of dead bugs. I sat there a long time, I made a fist, I released a fist. I breathed. A fist. I breathed. This fist. My heart’s modeled after it. Open, it’s to hold or offer. Closed, oh god of the plains, and I am your vicious club.