Ada Limón

3.

There is a slow tractor traffic hollering outside,

and I’d like not to be traffic, but the window shaking.

As if this big

dangerous animal is also a part of me,

that somewhere inside the delicate

skin of my body, there pumps

an 8-pound female horse heart,

Somewhere I had heard that, after noting the lack

of water pressure in an old hotel in Los Angeles,

they found a woman’s body at the bottom

of the cistern.

Imagine, just thinking the water was low, just wanting

to take a shower.

After that, when the water would act weird,

spurt, or gurgle, I’d imagine a body, a woman, a me

just years ago, freely single, happily unaccounted for,

at the lowest curve of the water tower.