The Hurting Kind: Poems

by Ada Limon

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