Bridget Kriner | Iterations of Explicit Knowledge Where Taylor Rd Dead Ends at Fairmount Blvd

Iterations of Explicit Knowledge Where Taylor Rd Dead Ends at Fairmount Blvd

–After the city removed a guardrail from the treelawn of a Cleveland Hts. homeowner, the house has been the site of 6 car crashes. After the 4th such accident, he placed a sign constructed from the rubble asking, Where’s My Guardrail?

Accidents will happen–a truth, but at this T-intersection, it gets six times strange.

Accidents will happen, they say. As in when you are on the periphery of sleep, crosswalking over to a REM cycle, not expecting a sedan to burst through your kitchen wall, like the breath of a wolf colliding with thatched straw. Breached like a flimsy membrane permeated by a cellular predator, just before it sucks the prey nucleus clean out.

Accidents happen–it’s what they say to minimize feelings. Even when coincidence has gone off the rails–the driver squeezing out of the broken windshield, an officer yelling–he’s in the house. From the shattered living room window, you put your hands up so as to not to double it, tempt the gun in his hands,

accident waiting to happen. Brownian motion theory explains how random particles suspended in any medium behave. Einstein imagined pollen particles pinging against water molecules. Sure, it’s quantum physics, but I can see it clearly from 20k feet–land is etched with roads where we dart & bounce, our fast machines finding every obstacle. Bad timing, a slight hesitation making a hard turn can change history, which, as you know well, repeats.

Accidents do happen–and sometimes they happen again four more times. It’s important to remember–you don’t have to be the driver in the accident for it to be traumatic.

Accidents happened. Once, a car struck me, a pedestrian in broad daylight. the driver so inebriated, I almost vanished. It’s always in the back of my mind. Look both ways, then again, my cervical vertebrae crackling with each head turn.

Accidents can happen again–this is how dormant trauma knocks around inside a body. You’re bracing because you know it’s coming. Get used to it a little bit. Use the broken cabinet doors & black spray paint – show them you’re exposed, hope they cut the wheel a second sooner.

Bridget Kriner (she/her) is a community college professor in Cleveland Ohio. Her work has appeared in Rattle (Poets Respond), Book of Matches, Shelia-Na-Gig, Whiskey Island and Split this Rock, where she won First Place in the Abortion Rights Poetry Contest in 2012. In her spare time, she enjoys hate-watching romance reality shows and sentimental primetime dramas. She has worked as a barista, bartender, abortion clinic patient advocate, union organizer, and fair housing tester.