“There Will Be Casualties”
—President Donald J. Trump (2/28/26)
By Ashley Mace Havird
I saw it from the top of the hill.
Hoped it was not a dead anything,
only a weird hump in the street.
(It was, after all, street-colored,
the same variations of gray.)
Cycled nearer. Dog? Too loaf-like.
Cat? No cat was ever that fat.
Possum it was,
I saw as my bike raced past.
Curled to die just inches
from its mother’s unbreathing snout,
a fetal joey (the offspring’s proper name).
Crawled or else flung from the pouch.
Old story, wrong place wrong time,
car gunning like a missile in the night.
Were there more young ones?
I could not look down to count.
It would have been dangerous.
I was going too fast, you see,
an old woman on an old bike,
dodging the pavement’s pocks and cracks
on my way to the gym and Pilates class,
flying almost, downhill. . . .
Opossum. I should use the proper name,
give it that much respect.
I confess that I could not stop
thinking of the little ones
in that school. Not the ones
who keep getting gunned down over here
in the US of A, but the bombed ones far away.
Girls in their bright headscarves,
with their bright dark eyes.
How could anyone look to count
the crayons and books and little shoes?
Ashley Mace Havird is a poet and novelist whose most recent collection, Wild Juice (LSU Press), appeared in 2021. The Garden of the Fugitives (Texas Review Press) won the X. J. Kennedy Prize. She has also published two chapbooks. Her debut novel, Lightningstruck (Mercer University Press), won the Ferrol Sams Award for Fiction. Swimmer, her second novel, is scheduled for publication (NatureCulture Press) in early 2027. Her poems and short stories have appeared in many journals including Shenandoah, The Southern Review, and The Virginia Quarterly Review, and in anthologies such as The Southern Poetry Anthology, IV: Louisiana; and Hard Lines: Rough South Poetry. Ashley lives in Shreveport, Louisiana, with her husband, the poet David Havird, and their own best dog in the world.
Photo credit: Casualties of War by James via a Creative Commons license.
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