American Honey

It's easier than you thought—leaving.Only one night spent sleeping on your ownin a motel parking lot beneath the starsof a summer Muskogee. Your long-built dreaddispersing like gas into a brilliantly blackOzark sky. For once, you are a girl

unmolested. You could do this: be a girlwithout a home. Always gone. Perpetually leavingbehind Strip Mall, U.S.A & the darkgreen dumpster you raid for food, something to own& the two kids no one will take care of & the dreadthat comes on when their father squeezes your ass. Star,

let your freedom build slow like the death of a staracross the years. & when she calls for you—granddaughterof Elvis, confederate flag bikini, voice you dread—let the interstate's roar swallow her sound. In your leavingyou see the country for the first time. Your very ownseeing. When he howls for you, your body is a silent, black

barn hidden in wild grass & your locs—pastoral, black—are ropes for him, swinging from its rafters. Death star.It's easier than you imagined—leaving behind your ownmother. Her ghost. Her meth. And now you can be a girlon a back patio with three white men, & you can leavewith their money, egg suede cowboy hat adorning your dreads.

You swallowed the Mezcal worm of your fear.Now you're standing in the cowboy's convertible, black& flying in the camera's frame. You're leavingwith the get-away boy you found sparklingin a K-mart parking lot. You're keeping it alive—your girlhood,the adrenaline, the novelty, the dying star that you own

a million miles away. You're learning how to ownyourself, how to be 14-deep in a 12-seater without dread,how to be disarmed, how to let it go when the white girlfrom Florida says nigga again, how to be the only blackgirl among strangers, dancing around a bonfire under the stars,singing out of the sunroof down the interstate. Leaving

each new town you meet and own a memory in, leavingbehind your mother's dread-veined eye. Her tragic star.Learn it all, girl, until what you've left behind is a brilliant black.