My Father, Hailing from Ignorant Hill, Texas, Would Drive at 100 Miles an Hour to
Clean Fouled Spark Plugs, Piston Heads on the Highway from Birmingham to
Hamilton, Alabama
My father burned carbon off his spark plugs,
cleared cylinders and piston heads of gunk
by excess of what put it there. I don't know
what told him when it was needed, but he knew, or
maybe he just knew when he wanted speed
and further assumed the good it would do:
Take care of the car, and the car takes care of you.
I'm sure he'd often told me that by then,
so I've wondered what the speeding held for him.
I used to think he was trying to outrun the backseat,
but I don't think he thought of kids, my mother,
white-knuckling the ride, or traffic ahead.
He focused, instead, on the democratic blur,
the landscape whipping past, the people sped
into smudge, and the car going too fast for anyone
to wonder who the hell he thought he was.
About the Author: Samuel Prestridge lives and works in Athens, Georgia. His work has been nominated for Best of the Net, and he has published work in numerous publications, including Literary Imagination, Style, The Arkansas Review, As It Ought To Be, Poetry Quarterly, Appalachian Quarterly, Paideuma, The Lullwater Review, Poem, Juke Joint, The Southern Humanities Review, Delta, Better than Starbucks, Synkroniciti, where he was a featured poet, Untelling, and Hog River Press. He is a post-aspirational man and is currently an Associate Professor of English at the University of North Georgia. His children concede that he is, generally speaking, an adequate father.
Image Credit: John Vachon “Garage mechanic. Oakland, Maryland” Public domain image courtesy of The Library of Congress
As It Ought To Be 