Driving Hazards

Ashley wang

Before my driver’s license test, my mother gifts 

me a list of hidden dangers—a boar’s body on 

the road, deflating into asphalt like expired 

rubber; deer scooping out weeds by the mouthful; 

lungs possessed by signal lights at hairpin turns. 

She leaves out the most crucial warning. The story 

where the night heaves and we’re driving past 

the closed curtains in condos on a suburban 

street, and she forgets, again, how to parallel 

park. The air in her Lexus so full of confessions 

as everything rises: the temperature, our tension 

headaches, tempers appearing as fast as the traffic 

light’s neon. We begin our routine, the flow of hot 

exhalations & broken logic, words thrown against 

each other like lawn darts. For an hour, we dismantle 

promises, reach for metaphors as escape hatches.

I am labeled with insolence and a lack of empathy; 

she with neediness. We both blame this on the other. 

We are well-versed in street corners and their capacity 

for implosion, spend half our lives pulling excuses 

from roadside signage and still, fail at everything 

we try. We are never good enough. I have grown to see 

language as an animal to be tamed, cross-bred as all 

the different dialects we wield. And now I’ve failed 

again: the creature bounding from my teeth as I pull on 

the latch of the door, body furling against the car’s steel 

chassis like a flag. This story’s omission was intentional, 

I’m sure. My mother refuses to say it, how this story is

the story of every car ride. How the condos could also be Route 

17 could also be the cracks along the Wegmans parking 

lot. And maybe this act of driving is merely love 

of another kind: trust in acceleration and leather seats, 

even with a crash in sight.

Ashley Wang lives in Lawrenceville, NJ. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Gigantic Sequins, Sine Theta Magazine, Up The Staircase Quarterly, No Contact Mag, Polyphony Lit, Plum Recruit Mag, Freezeray Poetry, CHEAP POP, and elsewhere. A 2022 YoungArts Winner and Best New Poets nominee, she edits for Polyphony Lit and reads for Palette Poetry.