Driving Lessons
Vincent Hostak
August 3, 2025
Children,
I will teach you an escape plan
from the Exquisite Boredom of Travel by Car
How there is always a way around coercion
Meet Child-Mind, the Trickster,
Your Forever Friend.
We learned Morse Code
when commanded to go dumb for just one half-hour
our feet tapped upon opposing backseat windows:
‘Are…we…there…yet?”
“For…THIS…we…get…ice...cream?”
Listen, these are important skills
I took the wheel once and
it’s good to know that you take yours’
Up here
the destination’s never clearly in-view
It’s outside your control, but
you can count the telephone poles piercing the sky,
let your eyes glide along the wires caging the clouds
Free them!
Spy swallows guarding a nest behind a billboard
they’re antagonizing a Red-Tailed Hawk, master poacher.
You may be a swallow someday. You’ll meet poachers.
There’s a reason we have no rear-view mirror in the back.
I-10’s the endless ribbon you were warned about,
spans the wide shoulders of the state, runs dawn to dusk.
It must end; it runs out of ground. There are no counties in the ocean.
After Van Horn we reverse the clock (“THAT...makes…NO…sense”)
Later,
You can take the curves too swiftly,
mutter warnings, consequences for behavior
“Don’t…MAKE…me…stop…the…Car”
But this one is true:
when recording the plates from other states fails you
see a fortress of scrub-speckled-mesas near Junction
the Southeast declining behind you, West inclining ahead
It’s a gravy-soaked landscape
Paper Fortune Teller says:
There’s Chicken Fried Steak in your immediate future.
It’s counterintuitive: how you may never tire of this.
I might today, but you should never tire of this.
You have the wheel.
Vincent Hostak is a writer and media producer from Texas now living near the Front Range of Colorado south of Denver. His recently published poems are found in the journals Sonder Midwest and the Langdon Review of the Arts in Texas, and as a contributor to the TPA. He writes and produces the podcast: Crossings: the Refugee Experience in America.
