#ada limon

[Text ID: GLOW by Ada Limon

In the black illegible moment of foolish want, there is also a neon sign flashing, the sign above the strip joint where my second big love worked as a bouncer and saved the girls from unwanted hands, unpaid-for hands. Thin-lipped ladies with a lot on their minds and more on their backs, loaded for bear, and for the long winter's rain, loaded for real, and I've always been a jealous girl, but when he'd come home with a 4 a.m. stomp in his boots and undress to bed, he was fully there, fully in the room, my sleeping body made awake, awake, and there was a gentleness to this, a long opening that seemed to join us in the saddest hour. Before now, I don't know if I have ever loved, but men have been very good to me, have seen my absurd out-of-place-ness, my bent grin and un-called-for loud laugh and have wanted to love me for it, have been so warm in their wanting that sometimes i wanted to love them, too,

And I think that must be worth something, that it should be a celebrated thing, that though I have not stood on a mountain under the usual false archway of tradition and chosen one person forever, what I have dones is risked everything for that hour, that hour in the black night, where one flashing light looks like love, I have pulled over my body's car and let myself believe that the dance was only for me, that this gift of a breathing one-who-wants was always a gift, was the only sign worth stopping for, that the neon glow was a real star, gleaming in its dying, like us all, like us all.

Skogsøya. Norway, Photo by Jonas Bendiksen, 2012

* * * * “I think poetry is a way of carrying grief, but it’s also a way of putting it somewhere so I don’t always have to heave it onto my back or in my body. The more I put grief in a poem, the more I am able to move freely through the world because I have named it, spoken it, and thrown it out into the sky. Everyone has grief that they carry and sometimes we have anxiety and depression about anticipatory grief. The thing that I’ve found that helps is knowing we are all in this, someone has gone or is going through the same thing. Poetry helps us with that too. Writing. Reading. As James Baldwin said, “You think your pain and heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, and then you read.” — Ada Limón interviewed by Lauren LeBlanc, BOMB Magazine

Larry Aregita

Farrell Dyde's Earth Motion 1977 Theatre Dance Unlimited Houston Dana Harper Wendy Miner Sarah Irwin Anne-Alex Packard Edie Scott Winston McAfee

* * * * *

“So then actually the process of praising and the process of noticing and the process of attention to the good things and the process of loving and the process of noticing the music of the world – I think that is as important and as necessary as witnessing and naming and holding the grief and sorrow that comes with being alive.”

Overpass

The road wasn’t as hazardous then, when I’d walk to the steel guardrail, lean my bendy girl body over, and stare at the cold creek water. In a wet spring, the water’d run clear and high, minnows mouthing the sand and silt, a crawdad shadowed by the shore’s long reeds. I could stare for hours, something always new in each watery wedge— a bottle top, a man’s black boot, a toad. Once, a raccoon’s carcass half under the overpass, half out, slowly decayed over months. I’d check on him each day, watching until the white bones of his hand were totally skinless and seemed to reach out toward the sun as it hit the water, showing all five of his sweet tensile fingers still clinging. I don’t think I worshipped him, his deadness, but I liked the evidence of him, how it felt like a job to daily take note of his shifting into the sand.

Ada Limón

First published in the print edition of The New Yorker  (December 4, 2017, issue).