A Conversation with Ada Limón

 

Ada Limón

A Conversation 

with Ada Limón

POLLY BUCKINGHAM, MIRIUM ARTEAGA, TORI THURMOND, SARAH KERSEY, & KYLE BEAM

5 February 2021

Weaving natural imagery with memories of the past and moments of the present, Ada Limón’s work explores both gender and race while incorporating elements of the surreal. The Los Angeles Review describes her work as being filled with “discovery, and rediscovery of self and world.” Limón’s poems guide her reader through her speaker’s self-exploration and encourage them to find beauty in the unconventional—in the way a neighbor mows his farm, in an 8-pound female horse heart, in a lady groundhog eating a tomato.

Biographies / Ada Limón

Ada Limón

Ada Limón

Ada Limón / Poeta Laureada de Estados Unidos

b. 1976

Ada Limón became the 24th Poet Laureate of the United States in July of 2022. Limón is the author of the poetry collections The Hurting Kind (2022, Milkweed Editions); The Carrying (2018, Milkweed Editions), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry; Bright Dead Things (2015, Milkweed Editions), a finalist for the National Book Award, the National Books Critics Circle Award, and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award; Sharks in the Rivers (2010, Milkweed Editions); Lucky Wreck (2005, Autumn House Press, reissued 2021); and This Big Fake World (2005, Pearl Editions).

Limón earned an MFA from New York University and is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, and the Kentucky Foundation for Women. Her work has appeared in numerous publications including the New Yorker, Harvard Review, Pleiades, and Barrow Street.

Limón is the host of the acclaimed podcast The Slowdown and lives in Lexington, Kentucky.

POETRY FOUNDATION

Late Summer after a Panic Attack by Ada Limón

Late Summer after a Panic Attack

BY ADA LIMÓN

I can’t undress from the pressure of leaves,

the lobed edges leaning toward the window

like an unwanted male gaze on the backside,

(they wish to bless and bless and hush).

What if I want to go devil instead? Bow

down to the madness that makes me. Drone

of the neighbor’s mowing, a red mailbox flag

erected, a dog bark from three houses over,

and this is what a day is. Beetle on the wainscoting,

dead branch breaking, but not breaking, stones

from the sea next to stones from the river,

unanswered messages like ghosts in the throat,

a siren whining high toward town repeating

that the emergency is not here, repeating

that this loud silence is only where you live.

Wife by Ada Limón

 

Fisherman's Wife

Arthur Hacker (1858–1919)

Wife

BY ADA LIMÓn

I’m not yet comfortable with the word,

its short clean woosh that sounds like

life. At dinner last night my single girls

said in admonition, “It’s not wife-approved”

about a friend’s upcoming trip. Their

eyes rolled up and over and out their

pretty young heads. Wife, why does it

sound like a job? “I need a wife” the famous

feminist wrote, “a wife that will keep my

clothes clean, ironed, mended, replaced

if need be.” A word that could be made

easily into maid. A wife that does, fixes

soothes, honors, obeys, Housewife,

fishwife, bad wife, good wife, what’s

the word for someone who stares long

into the morning, unable to even fix tea

some days, the kettle steaming over

loud like a train whistle, she who cries

in the mornings, she who tears a hole

in the earth and cannot stop grieving,

the one who wants to love you, but often

isn’t good at even that, the one who

doesn’t want to be diminished

by how much she wants to be yours.

Wonder Woman by Ada Limón

I
llustration by Kayleigh McCallum

WONDER WOMAN

by Ada Limón

Ada Limón / La mujer maravilla

 

Standing at the swell of the muddy Mississippi
after the Urgent Care doctor had just said, Well,
sometimes shit happens, I fell fast and hard
for New Orleans all over again. Pain pills swirled
in the purse along with a spell for later. It’s taken
a while for me to admit, I am in a raging battle
with my body, a spinal column thirty-five degrees
bent, vertigo that comes and goes like a DC Comics
villain nobody can kill. Invisible pain is both
a blessing and a curse. You always look so happy,
said a stranger once as I shifted to my good side
grinning. But that day, alone on the riverbank,
brass blaring from the Steamboat Natchez,
out of the corner of my eye, I saw a girl, maybe half my age,
dressed, for no apparent reason, as Wonder Woman. 
She strutted by in all her strength and glory, invincible,
eternal, and when I stood to clap (because who wouldn’t have),
she bowed and posed like she knew I needed a myth—
a woman, by a river, indestructible.

The Leash by Ada Limón

Photo by Daido Moriyama

THE LEASH 

by Ada Limón

Ada Limón / La correa

After the birthing of bombs of forks and fear,
the frantic automatic weapons unleashed,
the spray of bullets into a crowd holding hands,
that brute sky opening in a slate-metal maw
that swallows only the unsayable in each of us, what’s
left? Even the hidden nowhere river is poisoned
orange and acidic by a coal mine. How can
you not fear humanity, want to lick the creek
bottom dry, to suck the deadly water up into
your own lungs, like venom? Reader, I want to
say: Don’t die. Even when silvery fish after fish
comes back belly up, and the country plummets
into a crepitating crater of hatred, isn’t there still
something singing? The truth is: I don’t know.
But sometimes, I swear I hear it, the wound closing
like a rusted-over garage door, and I can still move
my living limbs into the world without too much
pain, can still marvel at how the dog runs straight
toward the pickup trucks break-necking down
the road, because she thinks she loves them,
because she’s sure, without a doubt, that the loud
roaring things will love her back, her soft small self
alive with desire to share her goddamn enthusiasm,
until I yank the leash back to save her because
I want her to survive forever. Don’t die, I say,
and we decide to walk for a bit longer, starlings
high and fevered above us, winter coming to lay
her cold corpse down upon this little plot of earth.
Perhaps we are always hurtling our body towards
the thing that will obliterate us, begging for love
from the speeding passage of time, and so maybe,
like the dog obedient at my heels, we can walk together
peacefully, at least until the next truck comes.

Cargo by Ada Limón

CARGO

BY ADA LIMÓN

Ada Limón / Carga

I wish I could write to you from underwater, 
                the warm bath covering my ears—
one of which has three marks in the exact
shape of a triangle, my own atmosphere’s asterism.

Last night, the fire-engine sirens were so loud
they drowned out even the constant bluster
                of the inbound freight trains. Did I tell you,
the R. J. Corman Railroad runs five hundred feet from us?

Before everything shifted and I aged into this body,
       my grandparents lived above San Timoteo Canyon,
where the Southern Pacific Railroad roared each scorching
California summer day. I’d watch for the trains,
howling as they came.

Manuel is in Chicago today, and we’ve both admitted
     that we’re travelling with our passports now.
Reports of ICE raids and both of our bloods
are requiring new medication.

I wish we could go back to the windy dock,
drinking pink wine and talking smack.
Now it’s gray and pitchfork.

The supermarket here is full of grass seed, like spring
might actually come, but I don’t know. And you?
I heard from a friend that you’re still working on saving
      words. All I’ve been working on is napping, and maybe
being kinder to others, to myself.

Just this morning, I saw seven cardinals brash and bold
                as sin in a leafless tree. I let them be for a long while before
I shook the air and screwed it all up just by being alive, too.

Am I braver than those birds?

Do you ever wonder what the trains carry? Aluminum ingots,
                plastic, brick, corn syrup, limestone, fury, alcohol, joy.

All the world is moving, even sand from one shore to another
is being shuttled. I live my life half afraid, and half shouting
at the trains when they thunder by. This letter to you is both.

Overpass by Ada Limón

 

OVERPASS

BY ADA LIMÓN

Ada Limón / Pasarela

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.

How to Triumph Like a Girl by Ada Limón

John Sloan, Sunday, Women Drying Their Hair, 1912. Oil on canvas. 

 

How to Triumph Like a Girl 

by Ada Limón

I like the lady horses best,

how they make it all look easy,

like running 40 miles per hour

is as fun as taking a nap, or grass.

I like their lady horse swagger,

after winning. Ears up, girls, ears up!

But mainly, let’s be honest, I like

that they’re ladies. As if this big

dangerous animal is also a part of me,

that somewhere inside the delicate

skin of my body, there pumps

an 8-pound female horse heart,

giant with power, heavy with blood.

Don’t you want to believe it?

Don’t you want to lift my shirt and see

the huge beating genius machine

that thinks, no, it knows,

it’s going to come in first.

Caveat by Fiona Benson

 

CAVEAT 

by Fiona Benson

But consider the cactus:
Its thick hide
and parched aspect

still harbour a moist heart;
nick its rind and
sap rises up like sugared milk

from the store of water
held beneath its spines,
its armoury of barbs

and, once a lifetime,
when the hard rain falls
there is this halo of flowers.

From Blossoms by Li-Young Lee

 

Two Peaches by Adriaen Coorte

From Blossoms

BY LI-YOUNG LEE

From blossoms comes

this brown paper bag of peaches

we bought from the boy

at the bend in the road where we turned toward   

signs painted Peaches.

From laden boughs, from hands,

from sweet fellowship in the bins,

comes nectar at the roadside, succulent

peaches we devour, dusty skin and all,

comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat.

O, to take what we love inside,

to carry within us an orchard, to eat

not only the skin, but the shade,

not only the sugar, but the days, to hold

the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into   

the round jubilance of peach.

There are days we live

as if death were nowhere

in the background; from joy

to joy to joy, from wing to wing,

from blossom to blossom to

impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.

Not My Best Side by U.A. Fanthorpe

 

Not My Best Side

by U.A. Fanthorpe

I

Not my best side, I’m afraid.
The artist didn’t give me a chance to
Pose properly, and as you can see,
Poor chap, he had this obsession with
Triangles, so he left off two of my
Feet. I didn’t comment at the time
(What, after all, are two feet
To a monster?) but afterwards
I was sorry for the bad publicity.
Why, I said to myself, should my conqueror
Be so ostentatiously beardless, and ride
A horse with a deformed neck and square hoofs?
Why should my victim be so
Unattractive as to be inedible,
And why should she have me literally
On a string? I don’t mind dying
Ritually, since I always rise again,
But I should have liked a little more blood
To show they were taking me seriously.

II

It’s hard for a girl to be sure if
She wants to be rescued. I mean, I quite
Took to the dragon. It’s nice to be
Liked, if you know what I mean. He was
So nicely physical, with his claws
And lovely green skin, and that sexy tail,
And the way he looked at me,
He made me feel he was all ready to
Eat me. And any girl enjoys that.
So when this boy turned up, wearing machinery,
On a really dangerous horse, to be honest
I didn’t much fancy him. I mean,
What was he like underneath the hardware?
He might have acne, blackheads or even
Bad breath for all I could tell, but the dragon–
Well, you could see all his equipment
At a glance. Still, what could I do?
The dragon got himself beaten by the boy,
And a girl’s got to think of her future.

III

I have diplomas in Dragon
Management and Virgin Reclamation.
My horse is the latest model, with
Automatic transmission and built-in
Obsolescence. My spear is custom-built,
And my prototype armour
Still on the secret list. You can’t
Do better than me at the moment.
I’m qualified and equipped to the
Eyebrow. So why be difficult?
Don’t you want to be killed and/or rescued
In the most contemporary way? Don’t
You want to carry out the roles
That sociology and myth have designed for you?
Don’t you realize that, by being choosy,
You are endangering job-prospects
In the spear- and horse-building industries?
What, in any case, does it matter what
You want? You’re in my way.

Survivor by McGough

 

SURVIVOR

by Roger McGough

Everyday,
I think about dying.
About disease, starvation,
violence, terrorism, war,
the end of the world.

It helps
keep my mind off things.

Poem [Lana Turner has collapsed!] by Frank O’Hara

 

Poem [Lana Turner has collapsed!]

by Frank O’Hara

Lana Turner has collapsed!
I was trotting along and suddenly
it started raining and snowing
and you said it was hailing
but hailing hits you on the head
hard so it was really snowing and
raining and I was in such a hurry
to meet you but the traffic
was acting exactly like the sky
and suddenly I see a headline
LANA TURNER HAS COLLAPSED!
there is no snow in Hollywood
there is no rain in California
I have been to lots of parties
and acted perfectly disgraceful
but I never actually collapsed
oh Lana Turner we love you get up