City Lights

Here are the oil refineries, cities of lights, that rise 
out of the darkening fields like castles.

On the tail of a six-hour drive, our teenage bodies 
rolling like loose change in the back of the car,

my sister leans into the window, sees the towers, 
and asks, Is that home?

And here is the shopping center’s glass skyline
that my father, from the passenger seat, mistakes

for downtown, thinking its squat offices and shops 
are the glittering hub of everything.

Down the road we go,
he hums, his voice a gravelly song.

We are two hundred miles of yucca and sorghum 
from our hometown on the coastal plains

where the highway parts the fields of empty,
and my father is the one driving through like a god.

An illusion, those lights blinking in the mud-black dark. 
They think we are almost there,

that something beautiful is coming to us.
And I say nothing, wanting them to have it.