the baby squirrel must have fallen from.
it’s too small yet to have fur, only skin
fuzzy like a pencil smudge, paws frozen
in that umbilical clutch, its brain spilled
in a fat raindrop of pink honey, a pillow
of egg white. a few paces before this
we saw what it could have become –
a big fellow, reified and bushy,
colored like toast – and I asked
if you had ever touched one. I longed
to reach to the pavement, open my palm
and let it claw its way up my exposed flesh,
and you said you hadn’t. but now
we are moving this barely born thing
into the grass so it might rest, I with my leaf and you
with your stick, and you’re saying
'I guess now I have.' this is how things feel
with you. secret glances, uncanny and delicious
coincidences, scary but easy. a long drive, strange
and twilit, all right turns. we should not
be holding hands, but we are. in my head
I am naming the little corpse. this, like many things,
I will never tell you.
Oct 19, 2025
Oct 19, 2025 at 1:15 PM UTC
the baby squirrel must have fallen from.
it’s too small yet to have fur, only skin
fuzzy like a pencil smudge, paws frozen
in that umbilical clutch, its brain spilled
in a fat raindrop of pink honey, a pillow
of egg white. a few paces before this
we saw what it could have become –
a big fellow, reified and bushy,
colored like toast – and I asked
if you had ever touched one. I longed
to reach to the pavement, open my palm
and let it claw its way up my exposed flesh,
and you said you hadn’t. but now
we are moving this barely born thing
into the grass so it might rest, I with my leaf and you
with your stick, and you’re saying
'I guess now I have.' this is how things feel
with you. secret glances, uncanny and delicious
coincidences, scary but easy. a long drive, strange
and twilit, all right turns. we should not
be holding hands, but we are. in my head
I am naming the little corpse. this, like many things,
I will never tell you.
inspired by Ada Limon's "What I Didn't Know Before"
