Summary
"Dead Stars" sets a cold outdoor scene in lines 1-4. The speaker is outside seeing that even the trees are bent over, and she feels like winter is pushing a cold hand against all of our backs (both herself and the trees). The trees' bark is black and there are yellow leaves, depicting a wet decay characteristic of the late fall transition into early winter. The world has no motion, and the stillness is so silent that the speaker feels almost like she's looking back in time.
In line 5, the speaker says she feels like a home or nest of spiders trying to do something, full of restless energy and effort.
Line 6 introduces another person who is helping the speaker roll the trash and recycling bins out to the street. They're looking at the stars together and point out the constellation Orion. The rolling bins make a sound like thunder, almost like a song.
In lines 8-12, the speaker feels that the moment is a little bit romantic until her companion says that they really need to learn different constellations (instead of just Orion). The speaker agrees and lists off seven constellations that she can name but always forgets about.
However, the speaker thinks in line 13 that the bigger problem is that humans forget that we're also made out of dead stars—that is, the same elements that made up stars that exploded or dissipated long ago. She says that her mouth is dust - that is, stardust (those same elements) and she wants to reclaim this kinship with stars. She wants to rise, to lean (literally) into the glow of the suburban streetlight with her partner as well as lean (figuratively) into the aspects of herself that are larger, more like the stars she is made of ("born" from).
The speaker suddenly gets the reader's attention in line 17 and says that we (humans) are spectacular. She reminds us how much we have survived and asks us in lines 18-19 to imagine what would happen if we decided to keep surviving and loving against all odds. Lines 20-22 ask us to imagine standing up against environmental crisis (symbolized by "rising tides") and using our voices to speak for the sea and the land.
In lines 23-24, the speaker asks us to imagine using our bodies to defend other people's safety, as well as the earth's. Line 25 envisions "a clean night," perhaps meaning a lack of violence and/or a lack of pollution. Additionally, the speaker invites us to imagine overcoming our fears.
Lines 26-28 close the poem with a final hypothetical: the speaker wonders if we can amplify our demands (for the safety of earth and each other) so high that they reach the sky—if we can make ourselves figuratively so massive and great that we become an example to future generations. She compares this vision to the scene at the curb earlier in the poem: just as the speaker and her companion are looking at Orion, she imagines future people pointing up at us while they're rolling their own trash bins out to the street. This will take place "when all of this is over"—some unspecified future beyond the current time, struggles, or limitations we face today.
Analysis
The winter scene that opens "Dead Stars" establishes a dark, oppressive mood. Lines 1-4 read:
Out here, there's a bowing even the trees are doing.
Winter's icy hand at the back of all of us.
Black bark, slick yellow leaves, a kind of stillness that feels
so mute it's almost in another year.
The first line makes clever use of reverse psychology: though the trees are the only thing mentioned, the wording "even the trees" implies that many other things are bowing over. Consider how we lose this effect if the first line reads: "Out here, the trees are bowing." In line 2, the use of "us" confirms that the speaker herself is also one of the bowing things. Winter is personified here as a hand at our backs, but less like a warm parent and more like a cold master forcing the speaker from an upright position into a bow. Already, the poem feels cold, confined, and hunched over. This personification matches winter's role elsewhere in Limón's book The Carrying: in "The Leash" winter comes to lay "her cold corpse down" on us, and "Instructions on Not Giving Up" mourns the trauma of "whatever winter did to us."
Lines 3-4 offer more visual detail and color: the trees take on the unnatural hue of black (because of nighttime? Wetness? Rot?) and the leaves are slick and yellow, most likely piled on the ground and starting to decay. The "stillness" and silence are conflated, and the effect is metaphorical time travel: the scene appears to be from "another year." This comparison deepens the feeling of alienation and powerlessness: looking at a photograph, a viewer perceives a scene without any power to affect it; alternatively, it evokes a brain-numbing depression or sorrow that is stuck in the past and has lost track of what year it is.
Pressed underneath this still, dark setting, the speaker's mind is an image of restlessness in line 5. See Quotes for a close reading of this line.
Limón's syntax deepens the feeling of confinement early in the poem. Of the first five lines, three are their own sentences, and four are end-stopped with a period. There is a conspicuous lack of enjambment—the breaking of phrases or sentences across poetic lines—which is a technique used to build suspense and momentum. These lines do not cascade into each other; they are rigid holding cells for their respective thoughts.
Lines 6-7 start very straightforwardly, but end on an unusual image:
We point out the stars that make Orion as we take out
the trash, the rolling containers a song of suburban thunder.
Trash bins being "a song of suburban thunder" is at once majestic and ridiculous. On the one hand, we may be inclined to let this unlikely image be beautiful. On the other, it may simply reinforce the feeling of confinement: the wild, natural force of thunder has been domesticated into the suburbs, into a tidy container, much like the preceding lines of the poem. At the very least, however, it breaks the grip of silence.
Lines 8-10 look harder at this tension between beauty and simplicity:
It's almost romantic as we adjust the waxy blue
recycling bin until you say, Man, we should really learn
some new constellations.
The key word in line 8 is "almost": the speaker can acknowledge the quaint beauty in this mundane suburban moment, but it remains partially confined by the smallness and stillness of the scene. In these lines, the second-person "you"—most likely Limón's husband, from the context of her writing at large and the sharing of this domestic chore—serves his crucial role as a foil to the speaker. He calls out this quaint romance for what it is, pulling back the curtain and causing the speaker to stretch her memory in the next lines:
And it's true. We keep forgetting about Antlia, Centaurus,
Draco, Lacerta, Hydra, Lyra, Lynx.
There is a subtle shame in these lines, but moreover a gentle acknowledgment of our human tendency to overlook the breadth and depth of the world in favor of select snippets. Interestingly, this list of constellations seems arbitrary and encyclopedic: they are nearly in alphabetical order, ranging from vast constellations (Centaurus, Draco, Hydra) to tiny, little-known ones (Antlia, Lacerta, Lyra, Lynx), and from the northern hemisphere to southern. It's unclear whether this is a list that occurred to Ada-the-observer as she was standing on the street, or was inserted later by Ada-the-poet at the time of writing, with a constellation list at hand. Indeed, there seems to be a subtle internal dialogue between Limón and her own mind's limitations. Perhaps the breadth of the list simply serves as a reminder of how rich and complex the world is beyond what is immediately familiar.
Lines 13-16 begin to accelerate, spurred by this move away from simple thoughts to larger ones. Note how the lines grow longer (line 13 is the longest so far) and more enjambed in these two stanzas, commas leading phrases into each other. The speaker makes the logical leap that her limited remembrance of stars isn't just about stars: it's about how we do or don't allow ourselves to be confined, made small.
But mostly we're forgetting that we're dead stars too, my mouth is full
of dust and I wish to reclaim the rising––
to lean in the spotlight of streetlight with you, toward
what's larger within us, toward how we were born.
Limón references the cliché of humans being made of stardust but makes it fresh through a new phrasing. The enjambment "my mouth is full / of dust" adds surprise to this striking image, as well as using "full"-ness to counteract the poem's earlier feeling of scarcity.
"Dead Stars," the poem's title, has multiple meanings: first, that our bodies are comprised of elements that used to make up long-dead stars. Second, it calls to mind the popular theory that the stars we see are already dead, given how long their light takes to reach us. While this is most likely inaccurate for the vast majority of our night sky, it is true that in looking at stars we are looking into the past. This image revives the themes of death and time travel from earlier in the poem. Despite the deathliness of the scene in stanza one, line 13 reassures us that death is not the end. Despite line 4 feeling trapped "in another year," the many implications of "we're dead stars too" leap across the boundaries of time and space. Limón takes inspiration from the idea that death is not a barrier to brilliance or beauty—consider the title of her fourth book, Bright Dead Things.
Lines 15-16 unite the suburban street imagery with the star imagery: the speaker and her husband are leaning into the streetlight just as they are leaning into their own greatness. To "reclaim the rising" and move "toward how we were born" does not mean creating new power for themselves but remembering that their power is already present within. Here, the speaker and her husband's kinship with stars becomes a return to their truer, larger, greater selves that exist underneath the mundane, suburban exterior.
Lines 17-19 contain the most straightforward statement of the poem's argument. See Quotes for a close reading of line 17. Instead of the act of survival being exhausting, it becomes empowering, an inspiration to future triumph:
Look, we are not unspectacular things.
We've come this far, survived this much. What
would happen if we decided to survive more? To love harder?
The stanza break at "What // would happen" is the poem's strongest enjambment yet, launching it from stable, grounded statements into the daring momentum of hypothetical questions. Line 17 seems to demand the reader's attention directly, moving the dialogue of the poem beyond "speaker + self + husband" to "speaker + world."
These lines are a clear and bold invitation to reclaim our own "rising," our own star-like traits that the speaker has been musing on. They seem to ask the question: What shall we do with this power? The following lines answer this question with a litany of increasingly daring questions:
What if we stood up with our synapses and flesh and said, No.
No, to the rising tides.
Stood for the many mute mouths of the sea, of the land?
What would happen if we used our bodies to bargain
for the safety of others, for earth,
if we declared a clean night, if we stopped being terrified
These lines demonstrate that the poem's motion is not just from confinement to greatness, but from the individual to the global scale as well. For Limón's speaker, our innate power and star-kinship are not a cause for selfishness but selflessness. In line 20 the phrase "What if we stood up" directly counters the hunched-over "bowing" of the opening scene. Standing proudly, "synapses and flesh" become an asset rather than a mark of our bodily vulnerability, a reminder to use our humanity to defend the planet and utter a defiant "No" to climate crisis (which can easily lead to despair, a central conflict of "The Leash").
Line 22 reprises the word "mute" from line 4, but this time silence is not the final word because the speaker has rediscovered her ability to speak out for nature. The "mouths" tie back to lines 13-14—"my mouth is full / of dust"—establishing a contrast between the speaker's mouth, which can speak with the power of stars, and the mouths of the sea and land, which cannot speak.
Lines 23-24 begin the massive sentence that ends the poem, cascading through thoughts with excited energy now. The speaker's concern moves from the earth to other people, and then fluidly back to the earth, signifying that she sees the issues as one and the same: to protect the earth is to protect each other, and vice versa. Line 25's "clean night" is an ambiguous image that calls to mind safety of many kinds: an absence of air or light pollution, an absence of violence, the presence of unity and love. We get a clue in the second half of the line: by overcoming fear, we can achieve the world the speaker envisions.
In the final three lines of the poem, humanity completes the ascension into a constellation of our own:
if we launched our demands into the sky, made ourselves so big
people could point to us with the arrows they make in their minds,
rolling their trash bins out, after all of this is over?
The speaker has gone from bowing down, to standing up, now to flying into the sky, the "rising" foretold in line 14. Limón leaves the "us" and "people" vague here, but we know by now that the speaker's utopic vision is one of justice, unity, and love. The "arrows they make in their minds" may refer to what we deem important—what made the speaker and her husband identify Orion, but not Lyra or Hydra. She suggests that by fighting hard enough for safety and survival, we can re-wire our brains to notice and focus on these elements more.
Limón has written often about poetry as a skill of noticing the world first and foremost, not necessarily judging or categorizing, and so this skill in observation comes first in this poem. Before dreaming up our ideal worlds, we first have to remember our own power. In an interview with Lauren LeBlanc for BOMB magazine, Limón said:
[P]oems give us a little way of noticing that there is also beauty in surviving and living and even thriving. So in a way poetry both complicates and simplifies. Complicated because life is messy and hard and simple because we are all going to die and so we get this moment to make something that might last.
This duality of death and survival is reflected in the last line of "Dead Stars," which mentions a vague "after all of this is over." "This" could refer to the speaker's life, her relationship, humanity, Earth's existence, all of time, etc. But importantly, the eternity envisioned in lines 26-27 exists in tension with the finality implied in line 28. The image of rolling trash bins returns, re-grounding the poem in its suburban, mundane setting as if to say: the circumstances of our lives aren't unimportant; we simply should not be confined by them.
Because the poem's final six lines are one long sentence, it's easy to forget by line 28 that it is a question, but the final question mark reminds us. Despite the boldness of the speaker's utopian visions, they are a possibility, not a certainty, and this possibility is handed to the reader to help make it real in the world.
