Fast Cars

By Jack Joseph Smith

Did I mettiom Wichita, Kansas Bank of Wichita on one side, Levenworth on the other Zooming along in any early seventies car I remember one hundred and sixty in a Galaxy across Saskatchewan in the summer of nineteen sixty three where you best leave up on it before you were taken, twisted into the distance But I had back track for my few times; took a Thunderbird and a Doge Cornet, sixty five, four hundred between Monroe and Junction City, right and eighty seven at the edge of Oregon's Willimatte Valley It was space in a steering wheel, and Later coliding with the truth

Original Scan

AI Interpretation

GPT

A road poem of speed and memory, where geography, machinery, and risk become one long American motion.

Claude

Wichita, Kansas opens the poem with American flatness and velocity — the Bank of Wichita on one side, speed on the other. The road poem format (places named in sequence, landscape glimpsed through a windshield) turns geography into one long American motion where memory and machinery share the same RPM.

The casual 'Did I mention' opening gives the poem the quality of mid-conversation storytelling — as if the speaker had been talking for hours and Wichita were just the latest in a series of arrivals that never quite become destinations.