As a child I would open my mouth to the sky
each morning at sunrise
before I got ready for school.
I’d open my mouth wide and wait
for something to pour, like hot tea, into it,
and trickle down the inside of my spine.
The world was made of snapshots, and today
I saw a red sun and the veins of trees
reaching to the hidden moon.
The morning was ripe, clean
as a washed body.
Bodies being born and dying.
In school, I studied Newton’s third law,
and I couldn’t stop hearing it in my head.
An opposite reaction for everything in the world,
a painting that mirrors the one we are seeing.
I saw the sky, dripping with blood,
and I knew that somewhere else, it was blue.
So much I could not see,
like the life of the woman on the bus,
who pressed her child into the cavity of her stomach,
ribcage jutting out.
I hungered to see, but bodies cannot move,
caught in their cages.
Somewhere they are moving, somewhere
they emerge from the frame.