Driving from Gallup to Albuquerque

I shook the kids awake
they could barely find
their wakeness in the car’s din and rush
and I pointed
out there on the desert
at the dust devil growing and
growing now the size of grandpa’s
mulberry trees
and said Look! A dust devil!
and they said What’s a dusdevvo?
of course they’d never seen any kind
of devil before
so I squished their heads together
that way they could both look
down the scope of my finger
There it is
it was the size of a brachiosaurus now
they said What is it you’re tryna show us?
well I jabbed at it—distant though it was—
with my finger and yelled That!
it was the size of a grain elevator now
It is dirt and wind but it resembles a desire
that slicks its way into you that roils and rolls
and it’s trying for some shape some
serpentine something
but it’s as evasive and bootless as a phantom
and it’s gone quick as it starts but your skin burns
and you’re chewing on grit ’til you’re chewing
on nothing
but just as I said it the wind crushed
over us and moved on and the dust
devil shrank and fell
so did my finger.

The one kid turned to me and grabbed
me by the collar Look he said
Don’t wake us up for none
of your fancy pancy dusdevvos and he went back to sleep
but the other kid, she stayed awake watching
the horizon and her breath turned
the window opaque.

Today My Mother Phoned to Say

she’d found three
or so dozen
empty Coke cans
in the garage
behind the boxes of food,
referring, of course,
to the freeze-dried food
stacked along the wall by the spare fridge
in boxes,
each holding
six gallon-sized cans
of dried beans,
potato dust,
tomato chalk that my father bought because
he was convinced—
no, not convinced, but apprehensive—
that the apocalypse—
no, not the apocalypse, but a catastrophe heralding the end of the world—
might occur at midnight
January 1, 2000,
and three or so dozen boxes of
sweatless
wetless cans were a measure
to keep his family
safe and inhibit worry.
But then the years stumbled over each other
and nothing ended
but there was plenty
of stuttering starts and
our meals were wet
with the wetness
of now
and my brothers and I,
like rodeo clowns,
learned to balance and roll
on the 50-gallon
polyethylene barrel my father bought in 1999
to horde—no,
not horde but safekeep—water
should the world... well...
and my sister stacked the boxes of freeze-dried food
for volleyball exercises because
they were sturdy
and full of sawdust
for all we knew.
So after all that clowning and exercise
who wouldn’t
want a Coke? The caffeine-free Coke
my mom bought to protect us
from drugs came in a gold can, all the more
tantalizing. And all the more tantalizing
because Cokes
were relegated to Saturdays
to protect
us from sugar. But we did not
relegate our clowning,
nor our exercise, nor our stick swording through
worlds imagined, nor our Spiderman
wannabeing, nor
our Saltine-eating championships
to Saturdays. So when the sweat
spouted out our scalps
and ran
down our cheeks and brought our hair to points
next to our ears
so that we looked like one day
we’d be men with sideburns,
what could we do
but sneak?
To steal Cokes
and drink
them in the lurk
of the garage? Yes,
we stashed the empties
behind those boxes
thinking—no,
believing—
those stalwart
shapes
would hide them forever.
You understand,
the world could have
ended at any
moment then.
And a Coke to spite that
threat?
That was
sweetness and it was
sustenance.

Joshua Stuyvesant is a writer and artist from Albuquerque. He lives there with his wife, Becca, and their new, 16-year-old cat, Marty. He runs a studio ecosystem called Bingo. You'll find him hunched over a keyboard or a table saw most days. Thankfully, poetry and carpentry are so similar.