The Hurting Kind: Poems

by Ada Limon

But right now all I want is a story about human kindness, the way once, when I couldn’t stop crying because I was fifteen and heartbroken, he came in and made me eat a small pizza he’d cut up into tiny bites until the tears stopped.

It is what we do in order to care for things, make them ourselves, our elders, our beloveds, our unborn. But perhaps that is a lazy kind of love. Why can’t I just love the flower for being a flower? How many flowers have I yanked to puppet as if it was easy for the world to make flowers?

I love his selfishness, our selfishness, the two of us testing each other, swallows all around us. Every now and then, his teeth come at me once again; he wants to teach me something, to get me where it hurts.

But I do not want to kill that longing woman in me. I love her and I want her to go on longing until it drives her mad, that longing, until her desire is something like a blazing flower, a tree shaking off the torrents of rain as if it is simply making music.

I like to call things as they are. Before, the only thing I was interested in was love, how it grips you, how it terrifies you, how it annihilates and resuscitates you. I didn’t know then that it wasn’t even love that I was interested in but my own suffering. I thought suffering kept things interesting. How funny that I called it love and the whole time it was pain.

I forget I am a woman walking alone and wave at a maroon car, assuming it’s a neighbor or a friend. The car then circles the block and goes past me five times.

I have always been too sensitive, a weeper from a long line of weepers. I am the hurting kind.