The rage is boiling, is a drowning red.
My rage is knowing your death was not spectacular. That the odds were not in your favor. Surviving with a 10% chance, succumbing when it was 95.
The rage is me learning how your body, your circumstance, your lineage rendered that 95 improbable.
It's learning that stars decompose at a rate slower than Earth but burst faster than light. That each night as I watch them twinkle, sparkle in the tears welling in the corner of my interrogating eyes, their sisters, unknown to me, are bursting open, splattering space with the mineral contents of their innards—lungs, heart, blood spraying across a black pool of possibility. These bits of wonder, seeds of universe. Ash of cremation.
The rage in me is boiling, pressing at the capacity of my capillaries. My rage is the headaches, the pounding in the ears, the world shattering, disorienting and maddening migraines you experienced as the blood vessel burst in your brain. Spilling a red sea around it.
Thrashing in the tsunami of the red flood, you called me and asked about chickens. Asked when the guests were arriving, if I knew where your aunt was. You laughed and poured questions over me. You slurred and sloshed and fumbled.
I thought you were drunk, how could I know you were drowning?
I thought you were coming to surprise me for my birthday – drunk in a hotel room miles from campus I figured. I thought you'd call me tomorrow to tell me you had flown in and were outside waiting for me. Instead you called and told me you were in the hospital. You told me you were in pain.
People tell me they are in pain.
Now, I would never doubt them. Would never question if they were drunk on their sorrow, hyperbolizing their oppression, magnifying their confusion.
People are drowning, boiling in the red, the bursting blood of empire. I won't rush them off the phone like I did you, but I also don't know what to say.
Maybe this is why I eat pomegranates. Why I paint in sheets of red and choose to bleed despite my fear to conceive. So that I can see, spread, eat and eventually contain this infinite red tide I feel splashing inside of me.
