I know so much more about tenderness than I used to.

Poetry | Natalie Lim | Issue 45

August 7

I read a poem today about a couple 
on a winter morning, one baking bread, 
the other shovelling snow,
and imagined us for the first time
in a different season. saw myself kneading the dough
with both hands. if dough is ready,
it springs back when you touch it,
stretches thin without breaking –

let me shut the door behind you,
take the shovel, brush the snow
from your beard, scarf, shoulders.
I know so much more about tenderness
than I used to. my hands are learning to be kinder,
reaching for yours across the table, squeezing once
to remind you that this is all real. 
I feel you squeezing back. yes, there is bread
to bake and a sidewalk to clear and a storm on the wind, 
but I know more
about patience now, too.
about faith. the storm will come
and we will be here, at the table, 
eating bread with our hands
which belong to each other,
watching each snowflake land
exactly where it needs to be. 

Natalie Lim is a Chinese-Canadian poet living on the unceded, traditional territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh Peoples (Vancouver, BC). She is the winner of the 2018 CBC Poetry Prize and Room magazine’s 2020 Emerging Writer Award, with work published in Arc Poetry Magazine, Best Canadian Poetry 2020 and elsewhere. She is the author of a chapbook, arrhythmia (Rahila's Ghost Press, 2022).

Excerpted from Elegy for Opportunity by Natalie Lim. Copyright © 2025 Natalie Lim.Reproduced with permission from Wolsak & Wynn. All rights reserved.

Elegy for Opportunity
by Natalie Lim
Wolsak & Wynn

Publisher’s Description

In her debut collection, Natalie Lim asks: How do we go on living and loving in a time of overlapping crises? Anchored by elegies for NASA’s Opportunity rover and a series of love poems, this collection explores the tension and beauty of a world marked by grief through meditations on Dungeons & Dragons, Taylor Swift’s cultural impact, the all-engulfing anxiety of the climate crisis and more. Confessional, funny and bursting with joy, Elegy for Opportunity extends a lifeline from Earth that will leave you feeling comforted, challenged and a little less alone in the universe.

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