Ceilings
Jane-Rebecca Cannarella
I invited the sun inside
so we could make a meal from it.
Mornings built
from the streaks of a slow-moving chariot.
You set the breakfast table bed while I
cleared our shadows:
bodies imprinted on the mouthsore sheets
to make room for the empty plates.
We collected every grain of pointillism rays,
helpings of daybreak chewed:
sunny side up fortune-tellers.
And all mornings are a time portal
with hands moving across each other’s faces
in the thermometer rising of your room.
Once you made bacon and eggs
and let me eat it under your comforter
even though you preferred to eat at the table.
Kitchen in the bedroom: I’ve never been confined
to one room for one thing. A mouthful
in the stairwell, a body resolved in the living room.
Playing tag
from spot to spot, sunrise sorcerers,
and that day I ate the scrambled eggs
I thought I must have eaten that chicken’s soul
like how when you eat a spice you become one
with the earth it was born from.
We ate the morning, light changing
your eyes to cut grass. And I wait for the early day where
the sky’s buggy brings overcast clouds
so I can mail us boxes I’ve collected
of rain to wash down the persistent heat.
Jane-Rebecca Cannarella is a writer and editor living in Philadelphia. She is the editor of HOOT Review and Meow Meow Pow Pow Lit, and a former genre editor at Lunch Ticket. She is the author of Better Bones and Marrow, both published by Thirty West Publishing House, The Guessing Game published by BA Press, and Thirst and Frost forthcoming from Vegetarian Alcoholic Press.