by Lauren Camp

There was no moment apart from this stubbing self
and its newest habit
to hurt. Rapid, what we battered about.

In the courtyard, a boy in embroidered turquoise held a small rack
of candy strapped to his chest.
It was a sweet estate. Summer: blurred and distracted.

We had fought all week. Shut in
to greater, deeper, no response. Missed
the plane, which lengthened its vibration.

Stephen Hawking spoke of three different times that converge.
Walking into darkness, we found the darkness
a history of bat wings pushed to pinwheel.

That city wrapped in its buds. Its curbs and dogs
soaked to concrete. Did you see around us those careless
with joy all those hours

we shadowed? Such shame to need
what I can’t remember: the communion, or red skirts, the drench
as citrus let out its juice. Filled

with the reflex to find what is holy, we went—
root and plaster, doorways,
similar flowers, ghosts and cactus spines. In each place, I looked

through a lens as the sun
dispersed to its mirrors. And in some frames I found
God or salt, some high-pitched singing.

The church served its bells
as if to sound what I feared. How little I know myself. I love you.
We will die, live; these are our options.

The bats slanted, concealed.
They never stopped. You carried what we need.

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Lauren Camp serves as New Mexico Poet Laureate. She is the author of eight books of poetry, most recently In Old Sky (Grand Canyon Conservancy, 2024). A former Astronomer-in-Residence at Grand Canyon National Park, she is a recipient of the Dorset Prize, finalist commendations for the Arab American Book Award and Adrienne Rich Award, and fellowships from the Academy of American Poets and Black Earth Institute. Her poems have been translated into Mandarin, Turkish, Spanish, French, and Arabic. See laurencamp.com.

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.