poem

by Aaron Caycedo-Kimura

Search & Rescue

I’m not the lost child—

huddled in a ravine,

trapped, bleeding. Not

the string of searchers,

twenty or so feet apart,

calling the child by name.

What will you do next?

my mother once asked,

aware of my restlessness.

Fly to the moon?

Speaking of the moon,

I’m not that either.

It watches, illuminates

everything dim blue—

aloof. I could be

the bloodhound with a scent

in my nostrils, driving me

onward to pull against

the leash through fields

and woods to the creek’s edge.

Or maybe the scent alone

that lurks in a green hoodie

or the fuzz of a red sweater

caught on a thorny bush.

But more so, I’m the searching

itself, a flashlight’s beam,

scanning the foggy shrubland.

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Aaron Caycedo-Kimura is the author of Common Grace (Beacon Press, 2022) and Ubasute (Slapering Hol Press, 2021). His honors include a MacDowell Fellowship, a Robert Pinsky Global Fellowship in Poetry, a Connecticut Office of the Arts Artist Fellowship Award, and a St. Botolph Club Foundation Emerging Artist Award in Literature. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Beloit Poetry Journal, RHINO, The Cincinnati Review, Consequence, Shenandoah, Gordon Square Review, Cave Wall, and elsewhere.