Morning, and light seams through Juárez, its homes like pearls, El Paso rippling in the dark. Today I understand the fact of my separate body, how it tides to its own center, my skin crumbling from thirst and touch. The sun hangs like a bulb in corridor: one city opening to another. When did my heart become a boat, this desert the moving chart of my palm? And when did pain invert the sky to glaucous sea, each home on each hill rocking? I would give my lips to a soldier if only he would take them as sextant, our mouths an arc, my tongue the telescoping sight between. Below such light, the measure of boys swimming cobbles, their stomachs dripping wild stamen. See how they are clutching to their guns like lovers, as if the metal could bear them. Morning, and still in umbra, my dog and I walk, her tongue a swinging rudder.
From For Want of Water (Beacon Press, 2017). Copyright © 2017 by Sasha Pimentel. Used with permission from Beacon Press.