Boys I knew worked at their uncles’ body shops. They’d take girls like me for a ride. Turning onto the highway, marveling at the power; part liquid, part solid.

Sometimes they’d swerve towards the ditch, always calculating the damage, which parts broken, whether repairable, and what it would cost them.

Julia Klatt Singer is a writer and painter, and the poet in residence at Grace Neighborhood Nursery School in Minneapolis, Minnesota.