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Classic Car Magazines
You’ll usually find the problems
you’re looking for.
My father had a sunflower-yellow 1974 Triumph Spitfire
up on blocks
until the day he died, and he hasn’t even
died yet.
Not much wrong with it, but he saw the declining trust in such machines
as a sign.
People aren’t as nice as they used to be, but
neither am I.
I think we’re getting fewer paper towels per roll
than we did formerly,
and pedestrians give each other looks in the street like they’re all
baby-snatchers.
I remember two trips in the Spitfire, one to the lake
and the other
to R. J. Mars, one of those shops that we thought
had everything
until it was replaced by one of those shops that really does
have everything.
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Erik Kennedy is the author of three books of poems: Sick Power Trip (2025), Another Beautiful Day Indoors (2022), and There's No Place Like the Internet in Springtime (2018), all with Te Herenga Waka University Press. He also co-edited No Other Place to Stand (Auckland University Press, 2022), an anthology of climate change poetry from New Zealand and the Pacific. Originally from New Jersey, he lives in Ōtautahi Christchurch, Aotearoa, New Zealand. [This poem originally appeared in The Threepenny Review, Summer 2025.] ___________________________________________________________________________________
Photo by Lewis Wickes Hine, Library of Congress