Where the Circles Overlap

Written and read by Ada Limón

We burrow.
We hunch.
We beg and beg.

The thesis is still a river.

At the top of the mountain
is a murderous light, so strong

it’s like staring into an original
joy, foundational,

that brief kinship of hold
and hand, the space between

teeth right before they break
into an expansion, a heat.

We hurry.
We hanker.
We beg and beg.

When should we mourn?

We think time is always time.
And place is always place.

Bottlebrush trees attract
the nectar lovers and we

capture, capture, capture.

The thesis is still the wind.

The thesis has never been exile.
We have never been exiled.
We have been in the sun,

strong and between sleep,
no hot gates, no house decayed,

just the bottlebrush alive
on all sides with want.

Contributors

Ada Limón Ada Limón is the 24th Poet Laureate of the United States. She’s written six books of poetry, including The Carrying, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, and Bright Dead Things, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her most recent volume is The Hurting Kind. As poet laureate, she edited the collection You Are Here, part of her signature project focusing on how poetry can connect us to the natural world. She is a 2023 MacArthur Fellow, a former host of the poetry podcast The Slowdown, and an instructor in the MFA program at Queens University of Charlotte, in North Carolina.