I didn’t see the car until the car
shrieked its driver’s shock along the asphalt.
My mother screamed her body
out the kitchen door, the black poodle
a small comma on the centerline. The dog
lived on to bite us all, except
my mother. All our shadows cloaked
in a single blanket. Not me, but the dog
that was hit. Not me, but my mother thought
it was me & after that she was forever
a stifled panic, as if her body
were always halfway out to the street.
Christina Veladota’s poetry has appeared in The Laurel Review, The Journal, and Bellingham Review, among others. She has written two chapbooks, Clutch & Brood (Aldrich Press, 2016) and The Girl & Her Lions (Finishing Line Press, 2010), and is an associate professor of English Composition & Literature at Washington State Community College in Marietta, Ohio, where she is also the coordinator of The WSCC Honors Program. In 2014 she received an Individual Excellence Award from the Ohio Arts Council.