My Other Girlfriend is a Corvette

by Amorak Huey

William Bout

My favorite shirt when I was 18 said “Panama City Beach Shark Hunters Club” & had a bite-shaped hole at the side & I imagined my girlfriend sliding her hand in against my ribs but she broke up with me pretty early that summer, we were a bad match & anyway it was my favorite shirt mostly because I bought it in Florida during Senior Week during which I imagined hooking up with a girl from Atlanta, say, or Charlotte, & certainly many people hooked up that week but not me despite a box of Matilda Bay & many many bottles of Bartles & Jaymes, we were so young & decades later I still taste that week like popcorn at a movie I was somehow in — the drunk guy we watched masturbating on the fifth-floor balcony of the Holiday Inn as the crowd on the beach below jeered or cheered, I can’t remember, the twin white Corvettes parked at the T-shirt shop, the other Corvette whose driver K. tried to fight, T. & K. making out in her Fiero, it wasn’t K., it was some guy from the beach, some parts blur it’s true, it’s all saltwater & sand & kissing & cars & someone not me in the driver’s seat but the parts that matter I remember & none of it matters but oh how it did for a while — my best friend’s first taste of alcohol vodka on the tongue of a girl I wanted, “Pour Some Sugar on Me” burning through every car on the strip, the girl who showed us her breasts, the girl whose arm I touched as we passed, the guy who told me to watch my hands, the shame I still feel, none of it was real except it was, it was, I thought it was the first real week of my life, it couldn’t have been more 1988, the entire world neon then & so stupidly full of hope.

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Amorak Huey is author of Mouth, forthcoming in 2026 from Cornerstone Press, and four previous collections of poetry. Co-founder with Han VanderHart of River River Books, Huey teaches at Bowling Green State University in Ohio.