by Ada Limón
win the grueling mile-and-a-half Belmont Stakes.
Then the horse comes out, first just casually trotting
with his lead horse, and all at once, a brief break
in the storm, and he’s racing against no one
but himself and the official clockers, monstrously
fast and head down so we can see that faded star
flash on his forehead like this is real gladness.
As the horse eases up and all of us close our mouths
to swallow, the big-talking guy next to us folds his arms,
says what I want to say too: I take it all back.
DANDELION INSOMNIA
The big-ass bees are back, tipsy, sun drunk
and heavy with thick knitted leg warmers
of pollen. I was up all night again so today’s
yellow hours seem strange and hallucinogenic.
The neighborhood is lousy with mowers, crazy
dogs, and people mending what winter ruined.
What I can’t get over is something simple, easy:
How could a dandelion seed head seemingly
grow overnight? A neighbor mows the lawn
and bam, the next morning, there’s a hundred
dandelion seed heads straight as arrows
and proud as cats high above any green blade
of manicured grass. It must bug some folks,
a flower so tricky it can reproduce asexually,
making perfect identical selves, bam, another me,
bam, another me. I can’t help it—I root
for that persecuted rosette so hyper in its
own making it seems to devour the land.
Even its name, translated from the French
dent de lion, means lion’s tooth. It’s vicious,
made for a time that requires tenacity, a way
of remaking the toughest self while everyone
else is asleep.
DREAM OF THE RAVEN
When the ten-speed, lightweight bicycle broke down
off the highway lined thick with orange trees, I noticed
a giant raven’s head protruding from the waxy leaves.
The bird was stuck somehow, mangled in the branches,
crying out. Wide-eyed, I held the bird’s face close to mine.
Beak to nose. Dark brown iris to dark brown iris. Feather
to feather. This was not the Chihuahuan raven or the fan-
tailed raven or the common raven. Nothing was common
about the way we stared at one another while a stranger
untangled the bird’s claws from the tree’s limbs and he, finally
free, became a naked child swinging in the wind.
THE VISITOR
A neighborhood tuxedo cat’s walking the fence line
and the dogs are going bonkers in the early morning.
The louder they bark, the more their vexation grows,
the less the cat seems to care. She’s behind my raised
beds now, no doubt looking for the family of field mice
I’ve been leaving be because why not? The cat’s
dressed up for this occasion of trespass, formal
attire for the canine taunting, but the whole clamor
is making me uneasy. This might be what growing
older is. My problem: I see all the angles of what
could go wrong so I never know what side to be on.
Save the mice, shoo the cat, quiet the dogs? Let
the cat have at it? Let the dogs have at it? Instead,
I do what I do best: nothing. I watch the cat
leap into the drainage ditch, dew-wet fur against
the daylilies, and disappear. The dogs go quiet
again, and the mice are safe in their caves, and
I’m here waiting for something to happen to me.
LATE SUMMER AFTER A PANIC ATTACK
I can’t undress from the pressure of leaves,
the lobed edges leaning toward the window
like an unwanted male gaze on the backside
(they wish to bless and bless and hush).
What if I want to go devil instead? Bow
down to the madness that makes me. Drone
of the neighbor’s mowing, a red mailbox flag
erected, a dog bark from three houses over,
and this is what a day is. Beetle on the wainscoting,
dead branch breaking but not breaking, stones
from the sea next to stones from the river,
unanswered messages like ghosts in the throat,
a siren whining high toward town repeating
that the emergency is not here, repeating
that this loud silence is only where you live.
BUST
I’m driving alone in the predawn
dark to the airport, nerves nearly gone
when I fly now, gravity only another holy
thing to contend with, what pushes us
down squeezing out the body’s air.
The shock jock’s morning jawing clangs
in its exaggerated American male register
to tell us how the twenty-four-year-old Colombian
woman whose breasts had been hacked
open and stuffed with one kilogram
of cocaine swiftly admitted the smuggled
property because she was in dire agony.
Wounds rupturing, raging infection,
she was rushed to a Berlin hospital.
Her three kids were home in her country
where she worked in agriculture, another
word for cultivation of land, for making
something out of dirt. The rude radio
disc jockey licks his lips into the studio’s mic
and says something about motorboating
her tits jammed with nose candy and I’m
thinking of my friend who’s considering
a mastectomy to stay alive, another who
said she’d cut them off herself if it meant
living. Passport and boots that slip on and off,
a sleepy stream through the radiation
machine. A passive pat-down of my outline
and I’m heading somewhere else before
the world has even woken up. I’ve got shit
to do and I need to lose a little weight before
I turn older. There’s the email scan of the bank
statement showing barely enough, the IRS
check, the dentist that’ll have to wait until
payday next month. We do what we have
to do to not cleave the body too quickly.
I wait for my zone to be called and line
up with all the others, the woman’s voice
over the intercom’s buzz reminding us
the flight is full, reminding us to carry
only what we need. The chill rises
up in the jet bridge as does the tremor
in my chest as we board, this shiver of need
that moves my hand to my breastbone,
some small gesture of tenderness for this
masterpiece of anatomy I cling to.
DEAD STARS
Out here, there’s a bowing even the trees are doing.
Winter’s icy hand at the back of all of us.
Black bark, slick yellow leaves, a kind of stillness that feels
so mute it’s almost in another year.
I am a hearth of spiders these days: a nest of trying.
We point out the stars that make Orion as we take out
the trash, the rolling containers a song of suburban thunder.
It’s almost romantic as we adjust the waxy blue
recycling bin until you say, Man, we should really learn
some new constellations.
And it’s true. We keep forgetting about Antlia, Centaurus,
Draco, Lacerta, Hydra, Lyra, Lynx.
But mostly we’re forgetting we�
��re dead stars too, my mouth is full
of dust and I wish to reclaim the rising—
to lean in the spotlight of streetlight with you, toward
what’s larger within us, toward how we were born.
Look, we are not unspectacular things.
We’ve come this far, survived this much. What
would happen if we decided to survive more? To love harder?
What if we stood up with our synapses and flesh and said, No.
No, to the rising tides.
Stood for the many mute mouths of the sea, of the land?
What would happen if we used our bodies to bargain
for the safety of others, for earth,
if we declared a clean night, if we stopped being terrified,
if we launched our demands into the sky, made ourselves so big
people could point to us with the arrows they make in their minds,
rolling their trash bins out, after all of this is over?
DREAM OF DESTRUCTION
We somehow knew the electric orange volcanic ooze
of hot lava was bound to bury us all, little spurts of ash
popping early like precum and not innocuous at all
blasted into the sky like a warning siren on the horizon.
The air felt different. The sky felt different. You felt different.
Still, there I was down in the valley where I was born, coyotes
on the ridges of the Mayacamas, turning over the steamy earth
to plant a garden. You were standing on the steps, staring
out at the sky’s ominous openings, a mouth of terrible red,
like a tongue that’d been bitten so often it was not a tongue
but a bloody wound with which the earth tried to speak. I held
that black rake in my hand like a weapon. I was going to rake
until that goddamn lava came and killed us. I was going
to rake and rake and rake, feverishly and mean, until the fertile
dirt knew I was willing to die trying.
PREY
The muffled, ruptured voice of a friend
turns into an electrical signal and breaks open
to tell me her sister has died. A muted pause,
then a heaving. Sounds sucked from lungs.
Outside, as the sun descends to inch-high
on the fallow horizon, a hawk grasp-lands
on the telephone pole. Brawny and barrel-
chested, it perches eyeing the late winter
seed head of switchgrass. Later, we’re talking
about self-care, being strong, surviving
a long time. The hawk launches as the sun
oozes puce and ochre and sinks. I write
to another friend who says her partner
is like a hawk—steadfast, wary. I think
of the sharp-shinned hunters, the Cooper’s,
the Swainson’s, how hawks are both serene
and scary as hell, scary that is, if you’re
the mouse. That’s the trick, we say,
isn’t it? Don’t be the mouse.
2
THE BURYING BEETLE
I like to imagine even the plants
want attention, so I weed for four
hours straight, assuring the tomatoes
feel July’s hot breath on the neck,
the Japanese maple can stretch,
the sweet potatoes, the spider plants,
the Asiatic lilies can flourish in this
place we’ve dared to say we “own.”
Each nicked spindle of morning glory
or kudzu or purslane or yellow rocket
(Barbarea vulgaris for Christ’s sake),
and I find myself missing everyone I know.
I don’t know why. First come the piles
of nutsedge and creeper and then an
ache that fills the skin like the Cercospora
blight that’s killing the blue skyrocket juniper
slowly from the inside out. Sure, I know
what it is to be lonely, but today’s special
is a physical need to be touched by someone
decent, a pulsing palm to the back. My man
is in South Africa still, and people just keep
dying even when I try to pretend like they’re
not. The crown vetch and the curly dock
are almost eliminated as I survey the neatness
of my work. I don’t feel I deserve this time,
or the small plot of earth I get to mold into
someplace livable. I lost God awhile ago.
And I don’t want to pray, but I can picture
the plants deepening right now into the soil,
wanting to live, so I lie down among them,
in my ripped pink tank top, filthy and covered
in sweat, among red burying beetles and dirt
that’s been turned and turned like a problem
in the mind.
HOW WE ARE MADE
For Philip Levine
For months, I was a cannonball
dropped down the bore, reeling
in blurry vomitous swirls toward
the fuse; forty days with vertigo
is like that. My new equilibrium
was spinning inside the chambers
of spherical blackness when the news
came. You, with your wiry limbs
of hard verse, inky gap-toothed grin
of gristle and work, you who grimly
told us to stop messing around,
to make this survival matter
like a factory line, like fish scaling,
like filament and rubble, you
who would say, most likely,
this was all sentimental crap, you
had gone to cinders, blasted
into the ether without so much
as smoke. I stood then on the icy hill
under the expressway, filled
with the salt you had given me,
and for the first time that year,
my entire world stood still.
THE LIGHT THE LIVING SEE
For Adam & Michael
We’re stopped in Subiaco
to lay stones on stone
at a fellow penner’s grave
where we jaw, punchdrunk
and carsick, about being buried
or burned up. I don’t want
to take up any more space,
I tell the boys, both fathers now,
who, shaped like trees, lean
toward the earth. I imagine
their old daughters leaving a slice
of gas station moon pie,
rye, a nickel-plated acorn, ladies
picnicking in the shade of a pine
as immobile as the body’s husk.
Chemicals and maggots, sure,
but also a place to grieve, a creek,
a constellation of death to count on.
These men know something
I don’t. That someone will grieve
past their bones, count on them
to be there among the shaded trunks
of pines like the stark bars
of a generous cage.
(What if no one comes to the cliffside
where my skin’s ashes set sail?
No mourning kin, no lost hitchhiker.)
But friends, it’s lunchtime,
and doesn’t my mouth still work;
my appetite, my forked tongue?
THE DEAD BOY
It was spring then too, and the Southern grass
was thick with ant legs and needling beetles.
The day was all lemonade and meditation
on the true-blue atmosphere that held me
in the palm of quietude and survival. But,
from the summer-thinned dorm rooms, a young
woman came running, her oversized T-shirt
billowing, her straight brown hair wild as
she
begged us to call 9-1-1. Because we were
the adults, Fred and I ran toward the stale
hollow room where, already purple with death’s
permanent hue, the boy was gone. But Fred,
being a father, and maybe more hopeful,
tried to revive him. So I tried too. Turned
him to see the ruined face like a petaled
jellyfish washed to the stormy shore.
I don’t want to admit this, but I hated
him. Hated his face that I already knew
I’d see forever, hated the needle on the waxy
dorm room desk, hated the dorm, hated
the kid I loved back in college who mainlined
until his too-high pal had a seizure, hated
my ex who had died that way a different spring.
I hated the world, the pain of it that circles in us,
that makes us want to be the moon,
the treasure, and not the thing on the sea
floor. Later, I found out his name was Griffin,
part lion, part eagle, named for the king
of the creatures, named the guardian
of riches. And because symbols matter, I try
to say his name: Griffin, Griffin, but because
language matters too, I have to tell you: I did not
feel like I was laying down a lion, or a king,