Upon A Red Morning 

Canyons wake up slowly, so we do too: fifteen tousled heads and thirty dirty feet pressed in a row. Warm inside our wax paper envelopes like tootsie rolls, too cold to poke heads from sleeping bags. Rolling over, I tune my ear to the dirt, listening for the rumble of crustal plates beneath me but they lie still. I leave them sleeping. I have no such luxury and so I rise. 

Nestle coffee powder dissolves in hot water like cotton candy on the tongue, but it tastes only a fraction as good. Even so, the warmth and black bite of the chocolate liquid lift my eyelids. Ragged red skyline overwhelming my view. 

My little band of sleepy travelers snarl and tug at zippers and stuff sacks. This is the noise of the gods, and they are the antidote for loneliness. I murmur a silent prayer: Let us live like this forever. Eyes risen to sky and toes planted in cold sand, we are teased by the sun flashing between stone turrets. We bask in warm light for precious minutes before it hides again behind the looming sandstone. 

We gather around with spoons in plastic bowls giggling at one another’s grogginess. Sticky oatmeal goes down slow and the fullness it gives us is forgotten quickly afterwards. We stretch our limbs in unison with the billowing tamarisk clinging to the bank. Viscous sand cloaks our boats and bags, and the tables of our makeshift kitchen. Another day of caking our bare bodies in mud, dirt hardening on the subtle contours of muscle. Grit contains us like a second skin. We peel and pick at clumps of brown, unsealing like butterflies emerging into a new white world. 

Long after the mud is no more and my hair has lost its earth texture, I live here still. I lie in red dirt, bathed in its water-washed sediments, forever loyal to the solace of desert.