From Top to Bottom by Francis de Lima
And it means something to my father that I am here –
From Top to Bottom
after Ada Limón
Sometimes I like to be a little dramatic,
thinking I would learn how to use these legs like
digits in a typewriter, so unlike the roots of a tree.
I haven’t forgotten that you said there are so many
stories to use, staring up from the bottom of a pool
somewhere in France. I thought about lust –
the desire of life to repeat more life, to be a seashell
to the universe’s body, the same blood forming an ocean
in the aural, looming into a past that felt mostly like
a baggage claim center, an old stolen metaphor.
And so I pick a suitcase. Carry it with me to the
end of the garden, where I try to imprint the
biotope into the poem. My birds and my bees.
And I’m twenty-five now, excited and terrified
of all the things that grow, me included.
I heard the biggest forest on the isles is in Scotland,
but I’m not sure there are any forests here at all.
Those dark living things. As a child, with my father
we visited the cashew of Pirangi, wide like a map.
I remember it was cool underneath, like a city but better.
And it means something to my father that I am here –
yet another hop, a confirmation bias for nomadic nature but
I still feel like that doesn’t explain it. Like I would
have done it anyway, if for no other reason than
to do it. Whatever happens happens. The growth no
longer hampered by sunlight or a perfect state.
Not because of, but despite.
First published in ONLY POEMS (March 2024)
 | A guest post by
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I agree, we grow much like a tree, which is often a typewriter. Good job!
The poem feels like someone trying to understand the quiet miracle of becoming themselves, step by trembling step. There is a tenderness in the way the speaker looks at their own body, as if learning to inhabit it were an act of courage. The father’s presence lingers softly, not as a demand but as a hope, a small light carried across years and continents. The images forests, pools, suitcases, the vast cashew tree feel like emotional shelters, places where memory still knows how to breathe. What moves me most is the sense of a young person holding their past gently, trying to honour it without being trapped by it. At twenty‑five, the world feels both enormous and intimate, full of things that grow whether we’re ready or not. The longing for roots echoes through every line, even as the speaker keeps moving. Childhood shade becomes a place the adult self still seeks in moments of uncertainty. And beneath everything, there is a quiet insistence on continuing, on growing despite imperfect light. It reads like a soft, human affirmation that becoming is its own kind of bravery.