i must have been 4 or 5 years old my memory of the event so vague & my mother doesn’t quite recollect when the circus came to town and we sat in gritty smalltown wonder watching the trick riders their sparkle & feather the single sad elephant lifting pretty girls aloft with a crimson bed sheet across its back & the lion tamer coming on at last & snapping the dry warning of his whip & i have to assume wielding a chair & pacing an arc around the swaying angry cat until it had enough & charged him it seemed several minutes before they got out the hose and trained it on the mauling beast to drive it back the tamers shirt was tatters and blood he was carried out of the tents single ring ahead of the audience did it happen at all this medallion of memory—like the ceilings own perched above the persian sibyls head—torn down by the gravity of time & temperature folly & fear weariness & the weather within

---

Jeremy Gregersen is a graduate of the Universities of Utah (BA), Michigan (MFA), and Oregon (MA). His work has appeared in a wide variety of journals, including Cimarron Review, Poet Lore, Juked, Cortland Review, The Maine Review, and Michigan Quarterly Review. He lives in Las Vegas, NV with his wife and two sons, and he works as Head of School at The Meadows School.