by Lauren Camp

but in my small home always someone splitting
the berries or murmuring to the console, someone
to open the door to the impulsive
earth; no chance

to furl in a hideaway space and beg
deities the hours to float, mind elsewhere.
For two years, the house has had no songs,
though once it held chords against walls we had painted.

Along the way, I’ve been lucky
in history and hymns. Young, I raced through
pencils, pitch and language.
Though I am often ravished

now by the repeat of an underside—moist, ugly, blowsy,
and want to low every periphery,
want to hostage each pause, I will bless
the windows, the loyal light. I can be weakened

by joy. Even the smallest glisten
and I want everyone in it. Every dare
and dried dream. Before sleep last night, I read
a few pages in a small book on physics.

Time and space are not absolute.
The chapter facts that everything is important
only against other things. The sun constructs our house. A match,
our dinner. Greens and meat.

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Lauren Camp is the author of five books of poems, most recently Took House (Tupelo Press, 2020). Her poems have appeared in The Los Angeles Review, Pleiades, Poet Lore, Slice, DIAGRAM and other journals. Winner of the Dorset Prize, Lauren has also received fellowships from The Black Earth Institute and The Taft-Nicholson Center, and finalist citations for the Arab American Book Award, the Housatonic Book Award and the New Mexico-Arizona Book Award. See more at www.laurencamp.com.