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Poems

Wife Read Poem

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.

The Contract Says: We'd Like the Conversation to be Bilingual Read Poem

When you come, bring your brown-

ness so we can be sure to please

 

the funders.

Will you check this

box; we’re applying for a grant.

Do you have any poems that speak

to troubled teens?

Bilingual is best.

Would you like to come to dinner

with the patrons and sip Patrón?

Will you tell us the stories that make

us uncomfortable, but not complicit?

Don’t read the one where you

are just like us.

Born to a green house,

 

garden, don’t tell us how you picked

tomatoes and ate them in the dirt

 

watching vultures pick apart another

bird’s bones in the road.

Tell us the one

 

about your father stealing hubcaps

after a colleague said that’s what his

 

kind did.

Tell us how he came

to the meeting wearing a poncho

 

and tried to sell the man his hubcaps

back.

Don’t mention your father

 

was a teacher, spoke English, loved

making beer, loved baseball, tell us

 

again about the poncho, the hubcaps,

how he stole them, how he did the thing

 

he was trying to prove he didn’t do.

Late Summer after a Panic Attack Read Poem

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.

The Leash Read Poem

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.

A New National Anthem Read Poem

The truth is, I’ve never cared for the National

Anthem.

If you think about it, it’s not a good

song.

Too high for most of us with “the rockets

red glare” and then there are the bombs.

(Always, always, there is war and bombs.

)

Once, I sang it at homecoming and threw

even the tenacious high school band off key.

But the song didn’t mean anything, just a call

to the field, something to get through before

the pummeling of youth.

And what of the stanzas

we never sing, the third that mentions “no refuge

could save the hireling and the slave”?

Perhaps,

the truth is, every song of this country

has an unsung third stanza, something brutal

snaking underneath us as we blindly sing

the high notes with a beer sloshing in the stands

hoping our team wins.

Don’t get me wrong, I do

like the flag, how it undulates in the wind

like water, elemental, and best when it’s humbled,

brought to its knees, clung to by someone who

has lost everything, when it’s not a weapon,

when it flickers, when it folds up so perfectly

you can keep it until it’s needed, until you can

love it again, until the song in your mouth feels

like sustenance, a song where the notes are sung

by even the ageless woods, the short-grass plains,

the Red River Gorge, the fistful of land left

unpoisoned, that song that’s our birthright,

that’s sung in silence when it’s too hard to go on,

that sounds like someone’s rough fingers weaving

into another’s, that sounds like a match being lit

in an endless cave, the song that says my bones

are your bones, and your bones are my bones,

and isn’t that enough?

How to Triumph Like a Girl Read Poem

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.

What It Looks Like To Us and the Words We Use Read Poem

All these great barns out here in the outskirts,black creosote boards knee-deep in the bluegrass.

They look so beautifully abandoned, even in use.

You say they look like arks after the sea’sdried up, I say they look like pirate ships,and I think of that walk in the valley whereJ said, You don’t believe in God?

And I said,No.

I believe in this connection we all haveto nature, to each other, to the universe.

And she said, Yeah, God.

And how we stood there,low beasts among the white oaks, Spanish moss,and spider webs, obsidian shards stuck in our pockets,woodpecker flurry, and I refused to call it so.

So instead, we looked up at the unruly sky,its clouds in simple animal shapes we could namethough we knew they were really just clouds—disorderly, and marvelous, and ours.

Poems by Ada Limón

Ada Limón (born March 28, 1976) is an American poet. On July 12, 2022, she was named the 24th Poet Laureate of the United States by the Librarian of Congress. This made her the first Latina to be Poet Laureate of the United States. She is married to Lucas Marquardt.

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Poems