The Turtle

On the two-lane highway to Winchester, New Hampshire
the snapper squares up and hisses on the double yellow line.

Two small boys observe, over the blunt lip of the passenger window,
cracked to let in air, their Daddy creeping up behind her.

Daddy has tattoos all over his body, scurrying up his neck,
fire ants when boiling water is sloshed atop their nest.

Across his lower back, a confederate flag, a slab
of color spread over his dimpled spine, not as though hanging

in the wind, but immobile as a sheet cake, frosting so thick
and sweet it burns the tongue. He grabs the turtle’s tail, to drag her

from the road. The turtle snaps her neck around and whips
her mossed carapace to face the man head on.

The seat belts tighten across our chests when I brake
so as not to crush the turtle or frighten the man.

This snapping turtle has been on earth for 200 million years.
She can feel the planet’s electromagnetic force, live without breathing

beneath the winter’s ice. I let my engine idle,
thinking of my mother, who stops to scoop, with a shovel

kept for this purpose in her trunk, any snake from the road, even copperheads.
I have seen a snapper strip a white duck of its spine,

leave the length of it, tail to beak, at the center of a scummy pond.
She could bite Daddy’s tattooed finger off, although the human jaw,

for example, mine, has more biting force. My boyfriend rolls down the window
of the car to shout good luck, turtle man as I cross into the left lane

and continue down the road. What is to be gained
by not speaking to him in a human way? he asks when I protest.

What is to be gained by speaking at all? There is nothing to be gained
by either choice. The moment is meaningless,

as most moments are. And yet, eventually, they make a life.
Forget about Daddy and the two boys drinking in the scene.

They won’t even remember the turtle, but they will step into the water
with their hands cupping their private parts,

scared, like all little boys, that something will bite them off.
Why am I so angry my boyfriend spoke? Our arithmetic of complicity

has simply differed here. Thirty miles later, we round the bend
to my mother’s farm, rattle down the logging road to the reservoir’s fenny shore,

watch for the wrinkle on the water that means the turtle is there.
Around us the August woods are so green they pulse.

In a week Kyle Rittenhouse will shoot three men in Kenosha.
I watch the footage until my boyfriend takes away my phone

and lays it face down, beside the bed. The video loops
into the floorboards. Glow and slam of guns trapped under its shell.

I can still see the boy, after he tripped and fell. Feet and blue
gloved hands pedaling in the air. People run towards him and away.

He shoots again. The little boys in the car, I cannot forget them, actually.
A wrinkle on the water’s surface, the wild ducks pinwheel to the shore.