You take your coat and leave

You take your coat and leave.

I bend time

and watch car crashes in slow motion.

This time I am in the driver’s seat,

no longer the passive passenger,

bored in the back,

a witness to people’s infinite capacity to destroy each other.

How much worse can we make this for ourselves?

Metal folds like velvet at a safe distance.

The parts of myself I actually like are strewn across the central reservation.

Perhaps it would be neater if we lived,

saw how the carnage undoes itself.

Everything straightens out,

looks new.

Danger vanishes into habit.

I drive us home without stopping,

don’t give the people who don’t love each other

something to talk about.

You never took your coat and left.

Writing by BETHANY GOODWILL

Artwork by DENISE DOWDESWELL