by Ada Limón
and in the soft yellow hills the first flame goes out.
AFTER THE FIRE
You ever think you could cry so hard
that there’d be nothing left in you, like
how the wind shakes a tree in a storm
until every part of it is run through with
wind? I live in the low parts now, most
days a little hazy with fever and waiting
for the water to stop shivering out of the
body. Funny thing about grief, its hold
is so bright and determined like a flame,
like something almost worth living for.
LOSING
After your father gets lost for the third time,
you get angry because he won’t answer his phone.
Part of me wants him to stay lost. God, what has stolen my generosity?
He pours a bowl of cereal and milk and leaves the refrigerator door open.
He calls you boss and me mother. Yes, Mother, he says and rolls
his eyes when I tell him to eat something, to clean up after himself.
Would I be more patient with a child? Would I love the smallness
of a life more than the gone-ness of the mind? Yes.
I don’t know what to do with him, so I cook elaborately—
pea salad with blanched red onions, radishes and asparagus,
scalloped potatoes, all good things that come from the ground.
He eats the mini eggs I’ve left for guests until they’re gone;
he says, How do you feel about abortion?
I explain how you can eat violets, and dandelions, and wild chives,
so that we almost have an edible lawn. He says he hates birds.
I laugh and ask him, How can you hate birds?
He says he hates them because they’re everywhere, they are all over,
everywhere you look, and we look up at the sky together.
Turns out he’s right, those damn things are everywhere.
THE LAST DROP
You’ve just left your dad in Virginia with your brother after taking him to the neurologist to confirm that it is, in fact, Alzheimer’s. Now, you’re driving to New York to get your dead ex-girlfriend’s cats who need a home and even though we weren’t planning on cats, they’re fifteen and who’s gonna take them and you know them already and why not give some animals a home even if it’s another twenty hours of driving there and back? I tell Manuel about your travels and he says, It’s a good premise for a horrible road trip dark comedy movie. And there is something funny about it all. Your father hates cats, but they love him. And I spent a long time envious of your ex-girlfriend’s beauty and now I only miss her and want to love her cats for her. My memoir could be titled Everything Was Fine until It Wasn’t. My memoir could be called I Thought I Wanted a Baby but All I Got Was Your Dead Ex-Girlfriend’s Two Old Cats. My memoir could be called Before the Wedding You Must Suffer a Little. My mother’s motto is “Nothing Is Easy” and I tease her for it, but it’s true. Before he left, your dad said he didn’t understand the saying “Good to the last drop.” Does that mean the last drop is bad? he asked. No, I reassured. It means all of it is good, every single drop of it is good.
AFTER HIS EX DIED
We were quick to tell each other what we wanted. I said I want to be cremated and then I want my ashes to be tossed in the Pacific and the Atlantic. He said I was greedy for wanting both coasts, but he’d do it. I made it specific: Herring Cove in Cape Cod and Salmon Creek on the Sonoma coast (but also, I was thinking of the Calabazas Creek in Glen Ellen). He said any horse farm would do for him, and then he corrected himself to just any pretty pasture. He said we don’t believe in the afterlife. I stopped him and said, I don’t believe in God, but I do have some very interesting thoughts concerning ghosts. What he was trying to say, if I’d stop talking about ghosts for once, is that it’s important to have a spot to visit: a tree, a rock, any place where you can think of that person. We’ve got her two old cats downstairs now, hiding behind the water heater, the stairs, hissing and purring both. Last night, I dreamt that she didn’t like me, wouldn’t let me in a car that everyone else was getting into. Or rather she took the last seat in the car and everyone drove off without me. But this morning, I kissed the man she used to love and one of her cats crawled into my lap.
SPARROW, WHAT DID YOU SAY?
A whole day without speaking,
rain, then sun, then rain again,
a few plants in the ground, newbie
leaves tucked in black soil, and I think
I’m good at this, this being alone
in the world, the watching of things
growing, this older me, the she
in comfortable shoes and no time
for dishes, the she who spent
an hour trying to figure out that the bird
with a three-note descending call
is just a sparrow. What would I
do with a kid here? Teach her
to plant, watch her like I do
the lettuce leaves, tenderly, place
her palms in the earth, part her
black hair like planting a seed? Or
would I selfishly demand this day
back, a full untethered day trying
to figure out what bird was calling
to me and why.
NOTES & ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My deep appreciation goes out to my friends and mentors who put up with my questions, my moods, and my always asking for advice. I’d particularly like to thank those people who have read almost all of these poems in many different forms and have made them better for their attention and care: my stepfather Brady T. Brady, my mother Stacia Brady, Jennifer L. Knox, Jason Schneiderman, Adam Clay, Michael Robins, Matthew Zapruder, Vaughan Fielder, Rob McQuilkin, Trish Harnetiaux, and Heather Grossmann. Thank you to my teachers who are with me in everything I do. Thank you to Natalie Diaz for the letter-poems we wrote back and forth to each other for a year. Thank you to Diana Lee Craig and Jeff Baker for giving me a home on Moon Mountain to write and to breathe. Thank you to my father, to Linda, and to my brothers who, for some reason, never stop believing in me. Thank you to all the large-hearted people at Milkweed Editions who have been my guides and my pit crew. Thank you to my editor, Wayne Miller, whose keen eye is unsurpassed. Thank you to my mother, whose stunning paintings grace all of my book covers. Finally, thank you to my husband, Lucas, who encourages me to write everything about our lives even when it’s the hard stuff. I am forever grateful for this life.
Thank you to the editors of the following journals, in which the poems of this book, sometimes in earlier versions, first appeared.
Academy of American Poets, poets.org: “The Leash,” “Instructions on Not Giving Up,” “Notes on the Below”
American Poetry Review: “The Year of the Goldfinches,” “Almost Forty,” “Sundown & All the Damage Done,” “It’s Harder”
Buzzfeed: “A New National Anthem”
Copper Nickel: “The Contract Says: We’d Like the Conversation to Be Bilingual”
Guernica: “On a Lamppost Long Ago”
Lit Hub: “Prey”
MAKE: “On a Pink Moon,” “Trying,” “The Raincoat”
Mississippi Review: “Love Poem with Apologies for My Appearance,” “The Last Thing”
Monstering: “Wonder Woman”
National/Amtrak: “Of Roots & Roamers”
New Yorker: “The Burying Beetle,” “Overpass,” “Sway,” “From the Ash inside the Bone,” “Sometimes I Think My Body Leaves a Shape in the Air,” “Cargo”
New York Observer: “How We Are Made”
Poetry in Motion/MTA Subway/InDigest: “A Name”
Prairie Schooner: “American Pharoah”
Southern Indiana Review: “The Millionth Dream of Your Return,” “Dream of Destruction”
SWWIM: “Cannibal Woman”
Tin House: “Maybe I’ll Be Another Kind of Mother,” “Wou
ld You Rather,” “Carrying”
Tupelo Quarterly: “The Light the Living See,” “Sparrow, What Did You Say?”
Typo: “Full Gallop”
Virginia Quarterly Review: “After His Ex Died,” “Losing,” “The Vulture & the Body,” “Sacred Objects”
Washington Square Review: “What I Want to Remember,” “What I Didn’t Know Before”
Waxwing Literary Journal: “Late Summer After a Panic Attack,” “Bust,” “The Visitor”
What Rough Beasts: “Killing Methods”
“The Leash” was awarded the Pushcart Prize (2016).
“Killing Methods” is anthologized in Resistance, Rebellion, Life: 50 Poems Now. “A New National Anthem” is anthologized in The Mighty Stream: Poems in Celebration of Martin Luther King. “The Leash” is anthologized in Bullets into Bells: Poets & Citizens Respond to Gun Violence.
“Sway,” “From the Ash inside the Bone,” “Sometimes I Think My Body Leaves a Shape in the Air,” and “Cargo” were all written as letter-poems to Natalie Diaz as part of the anthology They Said: A Multi-Genre Anthology of Contemporary Collaborative Writing.
Cridet: Lucas Marquardt
ADA LIMÓN is the author of four books of poetry, including Bright Dead Things, which was named a finalist for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. Her work has appeared in numerous publications including the New Yorker, the New York Times, Tin House, and American Poetry Review.
Founded as a nonprofit organization in 1980, Milkweed Editions is an independent publisher. Our mission is to identify, nurture and publish transformative literature, and build an engaged community around it.
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Typeset in Garamond
by Mary Austin Speaker
Adobe Garamond is based upon the typefaces first created by Parisian printer Claude Garamond in the sixteenth century. Garamond based his typeface on the handwriting of Angelo Vergecio, librarian to King Francis I. The font’s slenderness makes it not only highly readable but also one of the most eco-friendly typefaces available because it requires less ink than similar faces. Robert Slimbach created this digital version of Garamond for Adobe in 1989 and his font has become one of the most widely used typefaces in print.