The Hurting Kind: Poems

by Ada Limon

I’m almost certain, though I am certain of nothing. There is a solitude in this world I cannot pierce. I would die for it.

Now we endure. Endure time, this envenomed veil of extremes—loss and grief and reckoning.

Translucent and slithering against the beige carpet, like a dozen fugitive ideas shoved to the back of the brain’s border—the ideas about hurting yourself or hurting others—they came into view, the filaments of nightmares, the stinging slopsuckers, the venomous miscreants, two pedipalps grasping for prey already in the first hours of their birth. How strange to think that nearly thirty years later, I see those nascent scorpions as clear as today’s dead moth