The child dreams a door, in the distance.
The distance is a metroplex theater,

each screen playing a different film.
No, the distance is a hand with brittle finger-

nails, one chipped. No, the distance
is a planet. There on the planet, a door,

a portal. The planet is the child’s 
round head, collapsed on a pillow.

In his sick bed, the child pants and moans,
asleep but still suffering, fever

spiked and a metal bowl set 
by his bedside in case he vomits. 

Wouldn’t that child like to go through
the door on the faraway planet?

With his pale hand he might open it
to find an elephant, a whole herd

of elephants, stomping through the red 
dust that is characteristic of the planet,

for which the planet is known, stirring 
it up in big, blood-colored dust clouds. 

Or, he might find a theater, totally empty, 
no one in masks, playing his favorite 

superhero movie, the one where the hero 
saves the red planet from a black hole

hurtling through the multiverse. He might 
find a poem, written by his mother, left 

on his pillow. The poem is a limerick 
about the child’s dog attending 

a birthday party filled with red balloons, 
red as the child’s cheeks, hot with fever. 

The child tucks into a curled ball
in bed, like an alien on that other planet 

might curl its armored back to form 
a protective spiral shell. Spiraled,

like the dreams of the child,
which corkscrew around the red planet. 

Spiraled, like the whorled beats of my heart
as I watch over him, check his chest

for steady breaths. Spiraled,
like the curled arms of a wide galaxy,

galloping across space, cradling 
the dusty red planet, cradling our own,

in its proton-heavy arms, 
in its star-hot arms, in its comet-pocked arms, 

cradling the sick and dreaming child.

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