When It Comes Down To It

Trip the door to stick, 

we with the bag mouths

yawping in the blank

space where our joy

once lived, little blooming 

weed, purple dead nettle 

where have you gone

good flourishing? Red 

feather I found bent 

on the wildflower berm

soaked but not soaked 

simply shadowed still 

unweighted, insistent 

it belongs to flight.

Ada Limón

Ada Limón became the twenty-fourth Poet Laureate of the United States in July of 2022.

Limón earned an MFA from New York University and is the recipient of fellowships from the MacArthur Foundation, Guggenheim Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, and the Kentucky Foundation for Women. Her work has appeared in numerous publications including the New Yorker, Harvard Review, Pleiades, and Barrow Street.