Courtesy of the author.

Works first appeared in “Sharks in the Rivers”, published by Milkweed Editions in 2010.

www.adalimon.com

Ada Limón is featured in Edition: Out Of This World

Stuck in the answer of day,
all we’ve got are these people to rely on—
and trees, and the grasp of a river in the mind.

High hillside of home,
I’m waving from the cement center, can you see me?

All the beautiful girls in the office are laughing and I laugh
along. And all of us good people, honest and clean,

And what puts the mean in some of us?

Sumptuous mountain, midnight milkweed,
come to the valley of neon and no-crying.

I’ve got this big city in me. Pretty on fire, pretty high wired.

It’s been a year since Jess died; she said,
I always knew it would come down to pills in the applesauce.

And the house is not haunted, nor the office.

I wish it was, don’t you?

We were wilder before, see-through shirts
and model boys and bouncers in hotels lobbies
across the country.

Who knew it would be hard to live to thirty-two?

A friend says the best way to love the world is to think of leaving.

We’re all in trouble, you know?
Piles of empty stars we’ve tossed aside for the immediate kiss.

Push me around a bit, shake my pockets, I store everything
in my mouth. I’m going to make an apple out of plastic,
going to make a real star out of the apple, then
I’m going to sell it to you.

I’m going to tell you it’s the most important thing.

I’m going to tell you I’m sorry, I’m going to crash
on your communal couch of unwanted.

Let’s say bloom.
Let’s say we’re a miracle of technology.
It’s harder not to say anything.

It’s all we’ve got, say it, pinch me.
You’re here. So am I. So there.

But everyone is busted a little.

No consciousness of the breaking, just the history
of a dirty footprint—even the easy stuff,
the small conversations about our worth.

(To be an anonymous object,
the innocuous heart, the smallest part of flesh.)

On Withers Avenue, a rat circled the bottom of a trashcan,
threw itself against the plastic green walls of its new world,
I heard it. I removed the top. I put the top back on.

(Small brilliant hole in the dark, let me out.)

Standing in my ridiculous human clothes,
I argued with the rat. I asked him,

Are you rabid?
Are you crazy?
Are you responsible for the plague?

He didn’t answer; he threw himself again.

Are you mean?
Did you hurt your children?
Did you hurt anyone?

I want to tell you that I let that rat out,

that kindness overwhelmed the tough pout of people-cleanliness.
I want to tell you I put him in a shoebox
and brought him to the country, fed him corn and taught him to read.

(Un-gettable parallel time, fathomless choices.)

I say to a stranger, I am harmless.
But the word doesn’t seem right. I have been harmed,
but I do not wish to do harm, but I could do harm,
(I am not without desire.)

I want to tell you the rat moved in with me, we made a good living.

But, I tell you, I let him be.
I think he might have managed to release himself,
he was not harmless. He had intent. Flirting with the world.

He’ll show up one day, long-wandered in the weather.

He just needed someone subversive to bend in
real close and say,

You can rustle all you want,
you can reinvent the shout,
but you got your rat-self in there,
now, get your cunning rat-self out.

Now when I go to the grocery store,
I’m amazed at the wide aisles of bright
food and food-stuffs and it’s nothing like
the bodega I shopped in for years
in Brooklyn between the bars we liked.
Once when I was going for groceries,
I ran into T, and we decided we needed
to drink, rather than shop, and we did.

There were a lot of beers on tap,
and the taps were all different like toys
in a dentist’s toy chest, so I said,
“I’ll have what she’s having,”
and maybe it was snowing out,
and it seemed to be at a time when
every shirt I bought at the secondhand store
would turn out to be see-through,
but I wouldn’t know it until it was too late.
So, a lot of conversations would start,
“Is this shirt see-through?” And it was.

We talked for a long time, grocery bags
empty on the chair, and we both talked about
moving to someplace like Montana
and how sometimes it would be nice
to see more sky than just this little square
between the bridges and buildings,
but then we’d miss Brooklyn and each other,
and we ordered another beer.

T was writing a play, also some articles,
and we both just needed some money,
and maybe to make out with someone
who wasn’t an asshole. But also, we wanted
to make great art. T was really good at naming
things so we decided she should be a “Titleologist”
and she liked that, so she agreed.

“What would we do if we lived in someplace
like Montana?” “We’d go for walks, and look at trees,
and write and look at the sky,” “Yes, and we’d cook
and go to those huge grocery stores that have toy cars
attached to the carts so kids can pretend to be driving,”
“Yes, and we’d probably have kids too.”
All of this seemed really far off and not like us at all,
so we ordered another beer and said, life was long.

Now, I’m walking around the grocery store,
in Kentucky and I’ve just looked a trees, and sky,
and I should write something, so I ask T to tell me
what to write about, she says, Saturation, and I think
of that feeling when you’re really full, or life is full
and you can’t think of anything else that could fit in it,
and then even more sky comes and more days
and there is so much to remember and swallow.
I ask T what I should call the thing I write about
Saturation, because she’s a titleologist, and she says,
“Someplace Like Montana.”