I can always rely on a poem by Ada Limón to give me hope, but Limón’s poems don’t give us the kind of easy Hallmark hope; her hopes are rather hard-earned, even laced with grief or misfortune. This 14-line pseudo-sonnet roughly follows the structure of a Petrarch sonnet with its octave (first eight lines) stating a tension and the settet (last six lines) including a volta (or twist). Here, the tension was a child’s divided life due to a parent’s divorce, and the volta begins with, “But let me say…” which precedes the last beautiful five lines. Limón is a master at skewing a simple idea (in hindsight, seeing the bright side of things). “And so I now have / two brains,” she writes. “Two completely different brains.” Limón also gives us two brains in her poems and reveals new ways of looking at the world. Selected by Victoria Chang
Joint Guardianship
By Ada Limon
Why did I never see it for what it was:
abundance. Two families, two different
kitchen tables, two sets of rules, two
creeks, two highways, two stepparents
with their aquariums or eight tracks or
cigarette smoke or expertise in recipes or
reading skills. I can’t turn it back, the record
scratched and stopping at that original
chaotic job. But let me say I was taken
back and forth on sunday and it was not easy
but I was loved in every place. And so I have
two brains now. Two completely different brains.
The one who always misses where I’m not,
the one who is so relieved to finally be home.
Victoria Chang is a poet whose fifth collection of poems, “Obit” (Copper Canyon Press, 2020), was named a DailyExpertNews Notable Book and a Time Must-Read. Her nonfiction book, “Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence and Grief,” was published by Milkweed Editions in 2021. She lives in Los Angeles and teaches in the MFA program at Antioch University. Ada Limon is an American poet whose latest book is “The Hurting Kind” (Milkweed Editions, 2022), from which this poem is taken. Her previous book, “The Carrying” (2018), won the 2018 National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry.
