(Or, “Objects in the Rearview Mirror May Appear Closer Than They Are”)
––Partially after Meat Loaf
Everything is clear in the rear view mirror. ––The Midnight
The ’86 Daytona peeled down Paterson Plank between
Liberty Place and Mill Creek Drive, “Paradise By
the Dashboard Light” promising my sister and I a few
hours of sibling revelry. It was summer haze,
somewhen early 1990s, with Renee’s Revlon-sponsored
curls careening out the driver’s side window while I,
shotgunned in the passenger seat, watched ennui melt
into the rearview mirrorworld. Soon, we’d
be at the mall, that holiest of pre-adolescent holies,
shops assailing our senses, every minute feeling
Fast Times at Ridgemont High. I’d lose myself in the
grunge and metal CDs at Sam Goody and in between
pages of Hit Parader and Guitar World magazines at
Waldenbooks beside the Payless Shoesource across from
a mom-and-pop shop where I scored my first Wilson
motorcycle jacket. There was an airbrush artist easled
up between the neon eatery and a corner store where I’d
buy Renee a ceramic unicorn each year for her birthday.
He spent hours spraying myriad mythical beasts onto
Levis, Champions, and other wearable canvases.
I’d peer past his He-Man-sized shoulder, amazed at how
delicately he handled the airbrush. My sister, she must
have watched me watching him because for my 16th
birthday, she got me a light blue denim jacket, and
on its reverse––Meat Loaf’s Bat Out of Hell II unfurled
in the artist’s own rendition of the original album art.
It was good, but not great, so I didn’t appreciate it
as much as I should have; as much as I would now, if
I still had it. Especially in the brokendown limelight of a
shopping mall haunted by all those yesterdays. One that
capsules these memories close; a still-beating testament
to the dozens of trips in that dragon-white Dodge,
Renee’s hair so big and so eighties––a forever burning
supernova of our unwastable years. My eyes swerve from
rearview to windshield, gaze to the horizon ahead, not
behind at the nostalgiabomb fallout far beyond
Mill Creek’s unbreakable grip. The Back Into Hell jacket
lost, but I can still hear Meat Loaf wail on about how
he remembers “every little thing as it if happened only
yesterday” over the Turbo Z’s infinite roar. Over
everything––everything––louder than everything else.
J.T. Trigonis (he/him) is a neon troubadour of the written and spoken word. With the obligatory M.F.A. in poetry, his work has appeared in over five dozen journals that have appeared on the bottom shelf of bookstands (and online, too) since 1998. He runs WAYE: A Poetry Reading Series in Jersey City, and serves as editorial director of WAYE Small Press, which publishes By the WAYE, a biannual magazine of poetry, visual art, and dialogue. His first book of selected poems, Through the Wreckage, will be published in 2026 by Finishing Line Press.
Author photo: Marinell Montales
Found Image: Oxford Valley Mall Postcard 3
Pine Hills Review 