The traffic is like the weather here, a topic of small talk. There is usually only one thing to say about that traffic and that is that it is bad. A lot of us have favorite accident stories, like the memory of a car suspended between two palm trees, because how does that happen? My first year here I saw a red car door in a merge lane. Shortly after, I noticed all the streaks of paint on the concrete dividers and the sprays of shattered glass at intersections. A wreck might sit on the side of a highway for a few days. I thought maybe as a warning. My first year I wrote with an art teacher who banned herself from mentioning the traffic in her notebook because all it did to write about the commute was make her mad. I get it. I’ve yelled fucking asshole at men and women who scream up my side or cut in and I’ve watched them weave their reckless way forward to take the next exit.But the other day someone complimented my driving. I’m calmer now (thank you Jesus), though anger still flares. The fear that I might die or my kids might die because some (created in the image of God) person is selfish enough to need to be in front of me and then in front of the next person and the next infuriates me. When I cry on the highway it is often at the state of my heart because when I am cut off or swerved at or flashed (high beams mean move out of my big trucking way) I really hate the other driver. It isn’t about me being in front of the other driver so much as it is about me and mine staying alive while the other driver gets ahead. So I cry because God wants me to love people and I think he includes that jerk in the Nissan Patrol.

A couple of weeks ago, I heard about a teacher who got hit while crossing the street in Salmiya. A couple of months ago, another woman was hit on the side of the highway while changing a tire. The man who’d stopped to help was also hit. All three are alive and while I don’t know the condition of the man, the two women have a long physical recovery ahead. Bones shattered, flesh too damaged to sustain operation, internal injuries, atrophied muscle. I can’t call either situation an accident when the more likely explanation for plowing two people in an emergency lane is carelessness and the more likely explanation for flipping a woman over a car is also carelessness.

I have a friend connected to both women. She talked about the teacher hit while crossing the street and the story stayed. A few days after, I started writing poems around the image of her laying on the street, surrounded by men who wouldn’t talk to her. A woman walking by cut through the men and sat down, stayed with her.

I Saw The Car

I had a dream like this, me looking up
looking down at my crumpled body on
cracked asphalt, circled by men with
unhurried voices. I am the only one who
hears my bones splinter again, who
hears the needle in my ear

The men do not kneel, touch,
pray over or speak to me. I saw the car.
I lift my head to say I saw the car
weaving speeding but I couldn’t
shout or step back from this cliff

A woman comes then, takes my hand
and stays. I say I couldn’t run or take it
harder than bruised and broken. I am
limp and rigid, my lips don’t work. The
woman closes her eyes for a moment
(I think it may be my death), says Jesus
in a land that calls him a man, only

I saw the car weaving speeding,
I saw my body balance between up
and down for a moment longer
than I thought possible

For N