What Rough Beast | Poem for October 6, 2018

Quintin Collins
Traffic Stop Blues

Blue lights swarm the car
as we drive home.
Blue lights stop the car
as we drive home.
We pull off to the shoulder,
unaware what we’ve done wrong.

Flashlights demand our hands
where officers can see.
Officers request our hands
where they can see.
One cop talks up the driver,
the other talks to me.

They point to a tail light,
a hole no bigger than a nickel.
They say the tail light
has a hole much bigger than a nickel.
They ask us for ID,
hands cradling their pistols.

They interrogate about guns in the car,
drugs, and past felonies.
They ask if anything’s in the car,
whether they have reason to worry.
They ask where we’re from, where we’re going,
and where we should be.

They talk to us like we’re boys
with their shields and their guns.
They think we’re just boys,
flash their shields, flash their guns.
They don’t want us to resist
their questions, even laugh to make it fun.

The cops give a warning,
keep their guns at their sides.
They let us off with a warning:
their guns at their sides.
We say, “thank you, officers,”
because tonight we don’t want to die.

Quintin Collins has works that have appeared or are forthcoming in Threshold, Glass Mountain, Eclectica, Transition, and elsewhere. A graduate of the Solstice MFA program, Quintin is a managing editor at a digital marketing agency, where he publishes writing craft blogs. If Quintin were to have one extravagance, it would be a personal sommelier to give him wine pairings for books.

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