![\"Roadkill](\"https:\/\/www.everywritersresource.com\/poemeveryday\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/12\/from-the-Smiths-1.jpg\")
<\/h2>\n<\/h2>\nby John RC Potter<\/p>\n
I saw a raccoon lying on the side of the road last night
\non his back, freshly dead, his paws raised in supplication;
\nhe reminded me of me:
\nbut can the dead still be moved through manipulation?<\/p>\n
Whenever I see raccoons lying dead on the road,
\nthey remind me of all those who have loved and lost:
\ndead and dying hearts on this endless highway of love,
\nwhose owners took a chance but at quite a high cost.<\/p>\n
I saw a raccoon dying on the side of the road last night
\non his back, still alive, wondering what had happened to him;
\nhe reminded me of me:
\njust a heap on the highway of love as the light grows dim.<\/p>\n
###<\/p>\n
John RC Potter is a gay man from Canada, living in Istanbul, and an international educator (currently university counsellor, formerly principal & teacher). He has experienced a revolution (Indonesia), air strikes (Israel), earthquakes (Turkey), boredom (UAE), and blinding snow blizzards (Canada), the last being the subject of his story, \u201cSnowbound in the House of God\u201d (Memoirist, May 2023). His poems and stories have been published in a range of magazines and journals, most recently in Blank Spaces, (\u201cIn Search of Alice Munro\u201d, June 2023), Literary Yard (\u201cShe Got What She Deserved\u201d, June 2023) & Freedom Fiction (\u201cThe Mystery of the Dead-as-a-Doornail Author\u201d, July 2023). John RC Potter \u2013 Author Website (author-blog.org<\/a>)\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" John RC Potter is a gay man from Canada, living in Istanbul, and an international educator (currently university counsellor, formerly principal & teacher).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":10196,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[463],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10194","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-poems-about-life"],"aioseo_notices":[],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.everywritersresource.com\/poemeveryday\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10194","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.everywritersresource.com\/poemeveryday\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.everywritersresource.com\/poemeveryday\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.everywritersresource.com\/poemeveryday\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.everywritersresource.com\/poemeveryday\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10194"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.everywritersresource.com\/poemeveryday\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10194\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.everywritersresource.com\/poemeveryday\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10196"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.everywritersresource.com\/poemeveryday\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10194"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.everywritersresource.com\/poemeveryday\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10194"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.everywritersresource.com\/poemeveryday\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10194"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}