Sienna's Reviews > The Carrying

So many of these poems sting with the absent weight of unborn children. We're forever discounting language, but imagine the perpetual twining of woman and mother in our society, the point at which the relationship is inextricable, and then imagine what it's like not to grow life in that way.

The suffering that ensues is so often silent, unshared because we are so bad at grief in this culture. What happens when someone is brave enough to confess to the babies wanted so badly but never born? Well-meaning awkwardness that stings even more. Because it's not meant to be, and having bodily autonomy is no balm when you want more than anything to be nurturing a person.

Limón documents what it means to grow, to bear another life, in so many ways. The nurturing of a garden. The experience of grief as a thing we carry. Romantic love as a splay-legged foal, ready to run upon birth. (There are many horses in these bluegrass-rich poems. I love them all, but the American Pharaoh shout-out felt particularly special. I waited 35 years for a horse to win the Triple Crown, a life goal over which I had no control, the fruition of which gave me permission to walk away from horse racing and never look back.)

Reading this felt like walking through her garden, gathering word-flowers that make you gasp at their beauty or truth.

I hated the world, the pain of it that circles in us,
that makes us want to be the moon,
the treasure, and not the thing on the sea floor.

*

Tell me what it is to be the thing rooted in shadow.
To be the thing not touched by light (no, that's not it)—
to not even need the light? I envy; I envy that.

Desire is a tricky thing, the boiling of the body's wants,
more praise, more hands holding the knives away.

I've been the one who has craved and craved until I could not see
beyond my own greed. There's a whole nation of us.

To forgive myself, I point to the earth as witness.

*

You were standing on the steps, staring
out at the sky's ominous openings, a mouth of terrible red,
like a tongue that'd been bitten so often it was not a tongue
but a bloody wound with which the earth tried to speak.

*

Will you tell us the stories that make
us uncomfortable, but not complicit?

*

He doesn't answer so maybe I don't exist.

*

...How can
you not fear humanity, want to lick the creek
bottom dry, to suck the deadly water up into
your own lungs, like venom? Reader, I want to
say: Don't die.

*

I am a hearth of spiders these days: a nest of trying.

*

Look, we are not unspectacular things.
We've come this far, survived this much. What

would happen if we decided to survive more? To
love harder?

What if we stood up with our synapses and flesh
and said, No.
No, to the rising tides.

Stood for the many mute mouths of the sea, of the
land?

What would happen if we used our bodies to bargain

for the safety of others, for earth,
if we declared a clean night, if we stopped
being terrified,

if we launched our demands into the sky, made
ourselves so big
people could point to us with the arrows they make
in their minds,

rolling their trash bins out, after all of this is over?

*

Funny thing about grief, its hold
is so bright and determined like a flame,
like something almost worth living for.

*

I can't help it. I will
never get over making everything
such a big deal.

*

Perhaps we are always hurtling our bodies toward
the thing that will obliterate us, begging for love