We held our weight back,
in the meaty muscles of
our calves as we trudged
down the hill from Bob Gaydos
Auto Body to Stewart’s for a cup
of coffee, with the desire to seek
shelter from the cold air as the
cruel wind whipped against bare
fingertips. We passed a dead squirrel,
smushed into the crumbled
pavement on the side of the
road, silently pointing it out to
each other as we tactically stepped
around its resting corpse. We both
let out a loud laugh as we continued
on. No need to wake the dead. We
both acknowledged that we
had almost met the same fate
only a week earlier in your
crushed black Honda Civic.
The rest of the walk remained
eerily silent, the sound of
eighteen-wheelers passing by,
just feet away, a white line is the
only thing that protected us from
another chance with fate. You step
on a small feather, grinding
it’s symbolic meaning into
the dirt, meant to be a part
of Kerhonkson for the rest of
eternity. New beginnings lie
in the hands of roadkill.

Samantha Zimmerman (editor; she/her) is an editor of Pine Hills Review and a current graduate student at SUNY New Paltz. She loves experimenting with different types of poetry and writing creative nonfiction. Her work has been featured in Sledgehammer Lit, Bullshit Lit, and Discretionary Love Magazine. She currently resides in a small town in the middle of nowhere in New York.

Twitter: @samthezim
Instagram: @broken_lullaby1999