Two Kinds It was dusk on a two-lane road in deep East Texas and we had not passed a word for miles when she said there are two kinds of people in the world. Years later, the turtles in my neighborhood know nothing of my friend’s philosophy. Or how simply some things boil down. The red-eared slider at my feet, flipped over and still but still here, knew seasons. She knew navigation and the grass best for nesting. Tenacity. Now, spun senseless to where the street met the curb, she lay bloody, mud-baked legs splayed flat and a gut-deep wound cracked clean down her belly. Turtles have inched their way across hundreds of millions of years, ducking one mass extinction after another protected by nothing more than the home on their back. Today, the turkey vultures working a squirrel three blocks away will catch wind of this one at my feet, an ancient traveler felled handily enough by steel on rubber and the kind who do not stop.
About the Author: Tina Williams is a former journalism instructor and advertising copywriter living in Austin, TX. Her poems have appeared in or are forthcoming in the New Verse News, Amethyst, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, and the Concho River Review.
Image Credit: Public domain image originally published in North American herpetology : Philadelphia, J. Dobson;1842. Courtesy of the Biodiversity Heritage Library
As It Ought To Be 