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AFFILIATES
Speaking Corvette
Robert Plant moans through my bedroom door
into my mother’s living room:
The way you squeeze my lemon, aahh,
I’m gonna fall right outa bed. . .
Zeppelin spins larger than the red & white record player,
I’m moaning face down in teenage angst, thinking, yeah,
I want to get laid, if it makes somebody say that,
like that.
Next day I meet Pete’s new cherry corvette,
‘63 with a back T-roof. Pete the construction worker
with blue-blue eyes, bulging forearms and a nice set
of car keys.
He’s Italian, can’t speak English,
but we both speak corvette—sleek rounded fins,
scalloped side cut-out/silver spinner hubcaps,
closest thing to sex I know at 16—
I don’t know Italian for wet between my legs,
but I feel it on the leather seats. Pete gives me
an American flag shirt and I wear it to bed,
rub the flag on my breasts
—till the juice runs down my leg. . .
We speed over Pittsburgh on break from my cashier job—
hit Bigelow & sail to Polish Hill, crank down winding paths
to the Strip. I like the way people stare after us.
Pete says,
“Da shirt, da shirt, you like?”
I love it, I say. I want to lose my virginity
but am too stupid to know how—I stare at the dashboard,
How to say:
red arrow to anywhere—in Italian?
.
I know the word in adolescent for get me outta here,
and Pete is it—I know the rumbling,
the jerking gear-change on a sidewinding turn,
I know vibration is masturbation in corvette, beautiful,
humming.
—from, Boneshaker, by Jan Beatty, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2002
Jan Beatty is the author of three books: Red Sugar (2008), Boneshaker (2002), and Mad River (winner, 1994 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize), all published by the University of Pittsburgh Press. For the past fifteen years, Beatty has hosted and produced Prosody, a public radio show on NPR affiliate WYEP-FM featuring the work of national writers. Beatty has worked as a welfare caseworker and an abortion counselor. She worked in maximum-security prisons and was a waitress for fifteen years. She directs the creative writing program at Carlow University where she teaches the Madwomen in the Attic writing workshops and in the MFA program.