Take a tongue, how deftly it darts out

at an errant crumb anywhere near the mouth, unthinking,

arrowlike in its accuracy, but try finding a lost word

and it’s stuck, so thick with thought, beefy, I want to say,

remembering the Genoa Delicatessen the time the woman next to me

ordered tongue, and the counterman held up a slab the size of a small arm.

It makes you wonder how to hold your own flesh, suddenly

three buckets too much, baggage or sausage, perhaps

the friend of a friend you met once

who can’t quite manage to embrace you, the way ribs

never make it all the way around,

stopping short, nothing like the serious stuff up there

where the skull encases its armadillo pillows, leaving the poor heart

almost wide open in its cage.

[…]

Barbara Ras, The Sadness of Bodies

You cannot live the same life as you imagine. You must live

a smaller life, a more compact life. The life you imagine is

too capacious, you will lose your balance. Driving home, I

think this.

Dionne Brand, Verso 24, The Blue Clerk

What I didn’t know before

was how horses simply give birth to other

horses. Not a baby by any means, not

a creature of liminal spaces, but a four-legged

beast hellbent on walking, scrambling after

the mother. A horse gives way to another

horse and then suddenly there are two horses,

just like that. That’s how I loved you. You, 

off the long train from Red Bank carrying

a coffee as big as your arm, a bag with two

computers swinging in it unwieldily at your

side. I remember we broke into laughter

when we saw each other. What was between

us wasn’t a fragile thing to be coddled, cooed

over. It came out fully formed, ready to run

Ada Limón