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All our windows open, steady drizzle the kudzu’s
broad backs, birds making their music like this isn’t North
Carolina, but a tropical rainforest, and we’re somewhere
deep in the palms and vines. But it’s our own ferns and fiddleheads,
evergreens and sugar maples, trillium blooming, or on the verge,
for no one in particular, for everyone in particular, as if to say,
Go on, enjoy it. Rain, flowers, time on earth. The apple I
hand-picked at the market. Braiding my friend’s hair, silver
in my fingers, how I tie a tiny bow gently at the end
just as the sun comes out. I want to believe this is true power, that
kindness is the only weapon worth wielding, and I wield it,
land blow after blow to my enemies, without mercy.
Mercy. Bring the wine. Set the table for surprise guests.
No matter the plates don’t match and we’ve run out of chairs,
only that there is bread and laughter, enough to go around.
Parades, in spite of—. Pride, in spite of—. Please, someone answer all these
questions I have about hummingbirds and the little futures we are
reaching for, the ones rising above the horizon right before our eyes,
such intoxicating visions, our truest selves, with nothing to hide. Go on.
Trust the child standing barefoot in the rain, her face turned
up to the sky. Trust that crescendo building in your chest is your
voice, singing what you need to hear, the stone-heavy echo
welled from darkest springs. Go ahead. Open the door. No one can
explain how to love the world. It doesn’t happen all at once. But
you can start here. Tonight, with yourself. Someone near you. Let it go
zigzagging town to town. Look, there. It’s already coming back around.
“I aspire to be more hopeful, in poems and in life. The abecedarian’s form helped propel the poem forward and allowed the catalog to grow into a call for more kindness, more love in the world and for it.”
Arielle Herbert is a queer poet and the author of Bottom Feeders (Black Lawrence Press, 2026). She is the recipient of the Claire Keyes Poetry Prize from Soundings East and the Lit/South Award for Poetry from Charlotte Lit Press. The 2025–26 fellow at Hellbender Gathering of Poets, Hebert lives in North Carolina.
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