Drag

They say I have attachment disorder
from years in the orphanage—I say
I’m attached to dirt: to the grit 
of stones, pulverized metal from 
the slag heap, I learned touch
from air, I fashioned love from
strangers. Your families
make no sense to me.
My mother’s the 4 barrel of a 409,
my heart’s dragstripped
from the shredded tires
of predators. Go ahead,
think of me—
throw the red flag down.
I’m one you never figured, 
dead engine start on a quarter-mile strip,
my lo-jack is the split/
the pull away—
you back there,
me running the distance. 

Copyright © 2024 by Jan Beatty. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on March 20, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets. 

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“I was thinking about Dragstripping, the name of my new book coming out in 2024 from the University of Pittsburgh. I was thinking of all kinds of drag, all kinds of stripping, and what drags us down, what holds us back. For me, adoption and living in an orphanage always come up; and I’m intensely in love with muscle cars. The collision of shredding, predators, and peeling off on a dragstrip was something I wanted to use as a compass. How do you locate yourself in this life? How do you locate yourself in the midst of power and trauma?”
—Jan Beatty