Taxonomy of Roadkill
CS Crowe
It was the lovebugs on your windshield until it wasn’t.
The wiper fluid low light had been on for months,
But spring passed with so little pollen,
Did it ever feel like, when even the rain fell,
The drops fell further and further apart?
It was the dead bird with her griseous feathers,
Arrayed like a watercolor painting on the asphalt,
Song-silent and feather-soft, you did not notice her
Beneath your tires until you got home and found
Bloodstains on your freshly power-washed driveway.
It was the turtle trapped in the median
Until it died of dehydration in the hot summer sun;
It went unburied and unmourned until they came,
Prisoners in orange jumpsuits, they planted tall grass,
But when the sun rose again, it withered in the heat.
It was the opossum, schrodinger’s carrion,
Who either died or played dead in the road,
But why not both? We all know what it is like
To be alive and dead at the same time:
A cut-flower placed gently in a vase of water.
It was the raccoon trapped in the dumpster;
It ate until it was too fat to climb
The grease-slick walls of corrugated iron.
It lived off rain and dew and stale donuts.
Was this not a paradise made by our hands?
It was the deer that dented your fender.
A lifetime of hiding in the underbrush
And running from every soft sound in the forest,
Only, in its final moments, to feel what it is like
To let an apex predator embrace it.
It was the cat that stood in the road,
A game of chicken you knew you would lose,
But you didn’t stop, why didn’t you stop?
Why didn’t we? So many warnings lights
On the dash, in the distance darkness.
It was the dog you knew by name,
This was how this story would always end—
Someone you love was someone else’s stranger.
If you wouldn’t slow down for the butterflies
And the moths, what’s left for us to save?
CS Crowe is three crows in a trench coat that gained sentience after eating a magic bean. He spends his days writing stories on a stolen laptop and trading human teeth for peanuts. A poet and storyteller from the Southeastern United States, he believes stories and poems are about the journey, not the destination, and he loves those stories that wander in the wilderness for forty years before finding their way to the promised land.
Art: Nia Hughes (she/her) is an oil painter currently pursuing her BFA in Studio Art at Oregon State University. Her practice centers on human connection, exploring how emotions and memories can serve as points of empathy; moments in life that ache with nostalgia and slip just out of reach. Working in semi-realistic portraiture, she captures these fleeting feelings through facial expressions, color, and quiet storytelling that is intimate and personal.
Nia is part of the Scholar Cohort for the Patricia Valian Reser Center for the Creative Arts and the recipient of the Dr. Helen E. Plinkiewisch Art Scholarship for the 2024–2026 academic years. Her work was also recently featured in the Personal Mythology exhibition at the LaSells Stewart Center during Summer 2025. Nia believes art can reach the parts of ourselves we neglect or shut away, allowing us to feel seen in ways words often can’t. Through her work, she hopes to create moments of reflection, warmth, and shared understanding.