Excerpts

Give Me This   I thought it was the neighbor ' s cat back to clean the clock of the fledgling robins low in their nest stuck in the dense hedge by the house but what came was much stranger, a liquidity moving all muscle and bristle. A groundhog slippery and waddle thieving my tomatoes still green in the morning ' s shade. I watched her munch and stand on her haunches taking such pleasure in the watery bites. Why am I not allowed delight? A stranger writes to request my thoughts on suffering. Barbed wire pulled out of the mouth, as if demanding that I kneel to the trap of coiled spikes used in warfare and fencing. Instead, I watch the groundhog closer and a sound escapes me, a small spasm of joy I did not imagine when I woke. She is a funny creature and earnest, and she is doing what she can to survive. Invasive   What's the thin break inescapable, a sudden thud on the porch, a phone vibrating with panic on the night stand? Bury the broken thinking in the backyard with the herbs. One last time, I attempt to snuff out the fig buttercup, the lesser celandine, invasive and spreading down the drainage ditch I call a creek for a minor pleasure. I can do nothing. I take the soil in my clean fingers and to say I weep is untrue, weep is too musical a word. I heave into the soil. You cannot die. I just came to this life again, alive in my silent way. Last night I dreamt I could only save one person by saying their name and the exact time and date. I choose you. I am trying to kill the fig buttercup the way I'm supposed to according to the government website, but right now there's a bee on it. Yellow on yellow, two things radiating life. I need them both to go on living. Drowning Creek   Past the strip malls and the power plants, out of the holler, past Gun Bottom Road and Brassfield and before Red Lick Creek, there's a stream called Drowning Creek where I saw the prettiest bird I'd seen all year, the Belted Kingfisher, crested in its Aegean blue plumage perched not on a high nag but on a transmission wire, eyeing the creek for crayfish, tadpoles, and minnows. We were driving fast back home and already our minds were pulled taut like a high black wire latched to a utility pole. I wanted to stop, stop the car to take a closer look at the solitary stocky water bird with its blue crown and its blue chest and its uncommonness. But already we were a blur and miles beyond the flying fisher by the time I had realized what I'd witnessed. People were nothing to that bird, hovering over the creek. I was nothing to that bird that wasn't concerned with history's bloody battles or why this creek was called Drowning Creek, a name I love though it gives me shivers, because it sounds like an order, a place where one goes to drown. The bird doesn't call the creek that name. The bird doesn't call it anything. 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. Excerpted from The Hurting Kind by Ada Limón All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.