Ada Limón is originally from Sonoma, California. A graduate of the Creative Writing Program at New York University, she has received fellowships from the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, New York Foundation for the Arts, and won the Chicago Literary Award for Poetry. Her first book lucky wreck, selected by Jean Valentine, was the winner of the 2005 Autumn House Poetry Prize. Her second book This Big Fake World was the winner of the 2005 Pearl Poetry Prize and is due out this fall. You can visit her blog.
The Circus Folk Find Fault in Their Own Humanness
The circus of us
is constantly leaving,
the elephants down the midway,
my little bone baby, my tented
world of un-machines.
Yes, we’ve killed most everything:
the caspian tiger,
the javan
and, it’s true,
the bali are all gone.
Still, our finest failure,
our human parts uncovered and
raw like a tiger wound
we cannot find a reason to touch one another
without a gasping audience in the room.
my little bone baby, my tented
world of un-machines.
Yes, we’ve killed most everything:
the caspian tiger,
the javan
and, it’s true,
the bali are all gone.
Still, our finest failure,
our human parts uncovered and
raw like a tiger wound
we cannot find a reason to touch one another
without a gasping audience in the room.
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