The Highway Technician
Kat Lewis

The Highway Technician
All I want is death to do my work
for me. Static cutting in and out over the radio,
shovel in hand, between the eucalyptus trees
that smell of west and husk in a morning of low light.
Today, an accident:
tire marks, glass glitter, an elk dying
as slowly as the decrescendo of interstate traffic
into the early hours.
The hooves type Morse code on the pavement
to the car that is long gone, now.
This morning I ironed my uniform pants in the dark. Yes. It would be easy
to bring the shovel down.
To call a trooper, to look
at a gun
I offer my hand
to the plane of its head, flat and heaving and hot over the lines in the road.
The elk barking away from my face,
until it doesn’t anymore.
By no doing of my own.
A car swerves around us, horn blaring,
maybe a middle finger behind the tinted window. The blind spots
of curves, nights, AM radio. Of this.
When I call my mother on Sundays
after waiting for the phone to ring on my end,
I can never put it to words.
I do not want to be the one.
I pick up the hind ankles and tug
hard, as if this is easy.

Kat Lewis is a poet and photographer from Northwestern Pennsylvania. She is currently a MFA candidate in Poetry at the University of Idaho. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Meadow, The Superstition Review, Santa Clara Review, Flyway, and elsewhere. She lives and teaches in Moscow, Idaho.