American Life in Poetry

A circus is an assemblage of illusions. Here Jo McDougall, a Kansas poet, shows us a couple of performers, drab and weary in their ordinary lives, away from the lights at the center of the ring.

What We Need

It is just as well we do not see,

in the shadows behind the hasty tent

of the Allen Brothers Greatest Show,

Lola the Lion Tamer and the Great Valdini

in Nikes and jeans

sharing a tired cigarette

before she girds her wrists with glistening amulets

and snaps the tigers into rage,

before he adjusts the glimmering cummerbund

and makes from air

the white and trembling doves, the pair.