Ghost Ride
I don’t mean the midnights I steal at fifteen
floating air & fuel down Dixie Hwy, under
the streetlamps’ orbed glares invisible after I slip
my 1988 Cutlass Supreme from my father’s
driveway. & this isn’t code between my
phantom love & I for when we meet in a shadow-
thick park near the Downs & I vanish
behind illegal tint. Not the dips we take,
the smoke in twisted wisps hovering near quiet lips
sheets of white brick beneath the floorboards.
Nor the time we get lost & disappear
into morning’s dark part hours cuffed on a curb
refusing to let the enemy search our person
for an evil that isn’t there, or how he came
& went that time, unable to touch us an unclean thing
wandered into the wrong realm. A girl
I can’t remember, is what I mean: me
behind the wheel in a brown boys’ procession
of candy paint. Each one the same age,
then, as his ghost now. My baby cousin
a reckless angel next to me going dumb shotgun
on my bench seat, when he still had teeth
in his head. When he still had yet to touch
flame to the underbelly of a spoon. With my boys I mean
my sex became neutral–a gear I shifted
into before swinging open the long coupe
door & placing both feet on the risk of pavement
West Coast sound bubbling into a night
country & silent, save the tire’s slow crunch.
I mean I had to get out, leave the whip with no direction
Joy Priest is a writer from Louisville, Kentucky. She has received grants and fellowships from the Kentucky Arts Council, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and Rutgers University-Newark, where she will be an MFA in Poetry candidate beginning Fall 2015. Her poems have appeared in Best New Poets 2014, Drunken Boat, Muzzle, and The Breakbeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop.