motorcycles

First the motors’ growl

The thrum and whine

From behind

cars bunched up

Six slow lanes on I-85

In autumn’s crepuscular light

Then the first one

Hurtling ahead

Another catching up

Serpentining

More black bikes

Slim black boys

Encased in leather

Helmeted like astronauts

The lion’s roar of them

The stupid stupid game

Surging past all of us

splitting like quicksilver

Who will lumber into their

Bright blazing path?

They buzz beside

Our creep and grind

Generate the wind

That rocks our vehicles

Stagnant we disapprove

What can it be

They flee from

They fly to

Every second averting

Catastrophe

Every second

They don’t die

An actual miracle

Oh I was wild once

But never like this

Here is youth baring its throat

To the sharpest knife

Fuck you I dare you

Someone batters

From within

My thick maternal swaddle

Propulsive as the motorcycles’ snarl

Trapped as I am

In steel and glass

Trapped as she is

In the rings of trunk

I’ve accrued

In the coming dark

Yearning

After them

Luminescent tail lights

Long gone

Laura Dickerman graduated from Hamilton College in 1985; she served on the board of Red Weather under the inspiring leadership of Peter Cameron. She attended graduate school at NYU (MA in Fiction) and the Breadloaf School of English at Middlebury College (MA in English); she worked at The Paris Review and was tempted by a career in publishing but became a high-school English teacher instead, working for many years at the Hopkins School, Germantown Friends, and the Collegiate School for Boys. She has lived in Vermont, New York City, New Haven, New York City again, Philadelphia, Brussels, New York City again, and now lives in Atlanta with her husband and two daughters Isabel and Lucy (class of ’24).

General board, Fall 1981 to Spring of 1983