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115 f r o m c l u b : g r a n d d a u g h t e r p o e m s n o f i n a l e If I were dying, or if I were convinced I were dying soon, say within a year, if I were told so by doctors, I would write a bunch of poems out of my nervousness and my love for being here. They would be what I saw on walks and times I would spend on the phone with my granddaughter remembering when we went to the Shrine Circus, and Julio tried the triple and missed, and there was no finale. They just announced—when we all expected there to be something else, at least a parade of clowns and elephants and jungle-ladies riding by—“Thank you for coming, folks. Let’s hear it for the Shrine Circus!” But we have more than memories. We have polaroids. Briny took them, of brightly lit jugglers and the little girl acrobat. She’d look through the camera hole and then look up and snap it, but when she looked up, the camera would tilt a little down, so we have a number of photographs of circus dirt with a part of a spotlight circle at the top. ...

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