The Dead
Hope F. Wabuke
| poetry
Always, driving along the broken roads
in Nebraska I see the animals,
bodies blurred along the yellow
centered divider—tufted fur and
fractured bone ground into black asphalt;
blood opened up to the cloudless blue
sky—and I wonder what they
were thinking. Why risk it? Did they
not see death sounding? Did they think
their strength was enough to defeat the coming,
roaring thing so much larger than their tiny
bodies? Did they think they, alone, were
fast enough, had enough time enough
to make it across? Or did they just believe—
young, oblivious—that death would come
at some point for all others but never,
despite anything, for them?
Hope F. Wabuke is the author of the chapbooks Movement No.1: Trains, The Leaving, and her, as well as the full-length collection The Body Family. Her next full-length poetry collection, Blood on the Leaves, will be published in 2026. A National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, she is Susan J. Rosowski Associate Professor of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.