The Hurting Kind: Poems

by Ada Limon

It’s cold today so the sun’s a lie.

he’d admit he was tired of history, of always discovering the ruin by ruining it,

A surge of relief comes like a check in the mail.

Once, he was sent for a box of matches and he put that box of strike-anywheres in the pocket of his madras shirt and ran home, he ran so fast to be on time, to be good, and when he did so, the whole box ignited, so he was a boy running down the canyon road with what looked like a heart on fire. He’d laugh when he told you this, a heart on fire, he’d say, so you’d remember.

At the funeral parlor with my mother, we are holding her father’s suit, and she says, He’ll swim in these. For a moment, I’m not sure what she means, until I realize she means the clothes are too big.

My shards are showing, I think. But I do not know what I mean so I fix my face in the rearview, a face with thousands of headstones behind it. Minuscule flags, plastic flowers.

What is lineage, if not a gold thread of pride and guilt?

Once, when I thought I had decided not to have children, a woman said, But who are you to kill your own bloodline?

Before our phones stole the light of our faces,

Love ends. But what if it doesn’t?

If I had known, back then, you were coming, when I first thought love could be the thing to save me after all