Thursday, September 17, 2026: Jeffrey Bryant's "Drive by America ----"

 

Jeffrey Bryant is a Pushcart-nominated queer poet from Los Angeles. His work has appeared in the LA Weekly, LA Times, Poetic Diversity, New Verse News, Poetrysuperhighway.com, Synkroniciti, Quill and Echo, Tension Literary, Journal of the Plague Years, Coiled Serpent, Altadena Poetry Review, Shadowplay, Sparring with Beatnik Ghosts, Cholla Needles Literary Journal and Tender Hearts Club. He will appear in a forthcoming photography book of Los Angeles poet portraits from Moon Tide Press. His debut collection The Catacombs of Vanished Lovers is out now on Cherry Pie Press. @thecherrypiepress

Drive by America ----

is there a stable freeway

not wobbling its furious 

concrete into screams

or its interchanging futures,

its off ramps not taken, 

all the gas, food, dislodging,

the phone sex on the call box, 

weigh stations 

buckling under the burden 

of youthful obsession,

all of it

one miniature golf course away

from heart failure? 

where on the GPS is this freeway, 

with its carpool lane to the stars,

everyone reduced to a vanity plate, 

windshield wiping years of trauma 

for the clarity of a Denny’s 

dead ahead? 

what goes on in the lonely homes, 

miles away from milk, 

and their yards

with horses ignoring one another 

surrounded by unincorporated regret,

the memory of the will to leave

buried in a backyard comforting

its corpses? 

what steering wheel 

turns me out of this galaxy 

with my window down, 

my cigarette lit like America, 

all dash and bite,

my hair all James Deaned 

for the first fuck stop I see? 

don't I have the right to touch you, 

major tom to major tom, 

in the back seat where we grew up, 

roadside servicing each other

before our neglected Infrastructures collapse? 

I am every question 

in need of air and water, 

every map laughing me past

my true north.

© Jeffrey Bryant