What Makes A Victim Pulled Over In Short Hills

Krish Mehta
Advanced Poetry
Mr. Martin
132 January 2023
The Contrast Between Cop and Victim The poem “Pulled Over in Short Hills, NJ, 8:00 am” by Ross Gay describes an early morning interaction between an unknown speaker and a cop after the speaker was pulled over in Short Hills. Throughout the interaction, the speaker becomes increasingly uneasy with the situation and expresses concerns about their own safety. The poem contains seventeen lines, eleven lines of enjambment, a first-person perspective, and no clear rhyme scheme. Although the poem seems to convey a normal interaction between the narrator and the cop, the speaker utilizes “shivering” to underline the predetermined bias the cop hascontains against the speaker, contrasting the power

The speaker writes, "his eyes scanning my car's insides, my eyes, my license, and as I answer the questions", allowing the reader tocan infer that the cop contains a predetermined bias against the speaker byr, creating an uncomfortable environment and an imposing demeanor to instill fear in the speaker (9-10). Furthermore, the speaker describes how the cop’s hand was “massaging the gun butt” while the cop glanced inside the car (12). The sexual connotation of “massaging” and “butt” is almost sexual and displays how the cop watching the speaker in fear seems to find the situation amusing, encouraging the idea of the cop feeling power and dominance over the

The speaker’s “shiver” mentioned in line 1 carries throughout the rest of the poem; the first line introduces the speaker’s initial reaction to being pulled over (1). “Shivering” underlines the speaker's fear and nervousness while interacting with the cop (1). In line 2, the speaker utilizes the simile between “rage” and “army of red ants” to symbolize how the interaction evokes strong emotion from the speaker (2-3). The use of the color red expresses the anger the speaker may feel, and the large army of ants represents a large flow of anger coursing throughout the speaker. The speaker furthers the idea of “shivering” through the simile of “quakes emerge[ing]” like “a virus” (4-5, 7). The simile creates a connection between the shivers in line 1 and the quakes in line 4, which correlate to the spread of a virus throughout the body. Similar to sickness, the speaker's shiver spreads throughout the body. In the line, “inside beg this to end”, the speaker refers to themself begging for the shivering to stop “before the shiver catches my / hands, and he sees, / and something happens” (14-17). The speaker creates a cause-and-effect relationship allowing the reader to infer the effect of the cop discerning a slight movement by the