Ada Limón

They come back to you as a signwhen someone dies, they say, a dragonfly,some dull moth skimming a mud puddle,a hummingbird in the ditch’s goldenrod.But what if they are alive? But not allowedto live? How do they return, then? Cricketunder the sink for three nights straight.Why do we call it a song? That scraping,that needy …

At the sentencing, a snake of painroiled inside her veins. She did notfaint or scream, or sink to the white tilethe way Alma did. She stuck her fingerin the ripped hole of her pocket’slining, she felt the inside of the woolcoat, the nowhere of material,that black hole of seam and stitch.She saw his face, blank, …