Black Ice

Katherine Hoerth

March 20, 2022

February 24, 2022

How easily we slip into despair

on the black ice of the heart. This highway,

with its glazed turns, stretches 

through the endless plains of Oklahoma.

I’m heading south. I’m driving home. I listen

to the radio—a world away, 

a war is born in Ukraine. Tanks plow over 

frozen roads. I fix my eyes ahead:

there’s miles and miles and miles and miles of wreckage—

the sun is up and glimmering, unveiling 

last night’s tragedies of mangled steel 

and shattered glass. The morning sky is now

the color of the aftermath of bombs. 

Ahead of me, an ambulance drives slowly.

We’re all inching forward now. My foot

hovers above the brakes, although it’s futile. 

The car still slips and slides. The ambulance

slips too. I wonder who’s inside, who’s brave 

enough to rescue one of countless victims 

of this ice storm. Every mile or two,

I see another toppled car, a jackknifed truck. 

At first, I count each one, and then I stop—

too many for the weary mind to fathom. 

That could be me: the ditch, the ice, the crossfire.

The news says that the Russians kept on shelling

Kyiv into the early morning hours.

There’s nothing I can do to stop it, no. 

A windmill’s turbines wave. I feel a gust

shove my car. I wince. My knuckles turn

the hue of snow. Ahead, the ambulance

begins its slow careen. It’s happening—

the horrifying choreography 

of calamity. It lurches left,

then swings back to the right. It turns and turns

like the earth, my stomach, and the tires

with nothing left to grip but gloss. It slips 

onto the shoulder then the median. 

I watch it through my window as it topples,

rolls like a snowball, like an avalanche,

a war out of control, until it stops,

as still as death. An eerie silence fills 

the frozen psyche and the morning air. 

Suddenly it’s in my rearview mirror.

What else can I do but keep on going?

If I hit the brakes and stop, the ice

will take me, too—and so I watch it grow

smaller in the distance, praying someone

else will interfere, that good will triumph 

like it always has, or so I let 

myself believe. I’m praying for the driver,

for the passenger, and for Ukraine,

for light, for this freak storm to end, for peace.

Deep inside, I shatter like the windshield.

Katherine Hoerth is the author of five poetry collections, including Flare Stacks in Full Bloom (Texas Review Press, 2022). In 2015, she won the Helen C. Smith Award for the best book of poetry. She is an assistant professor at Lamar University and editor of Lamar University Literary Press.