Taste the Part Between Us
BY LAUREN CAMP
Today the ordinary crusade of home, its wild bones
as daughter to the sword-cocked weapon of the heart. It is all left
unfinished, lifted from a failure of attention and the outermost tongue
of stone. We took a way around to loneliness, a private garden.
I met him here, my answers were a glass of fish. I meet him
here after three potted orchids. All this to wander
into my storage shape for father. Even his fisted words
were skin, his love a bread. May this time suit us better, this gaunt
adventure, the place the rare self comes to bloom. Each fraction
of regret would fragrant. I think of this year as a sort of knowing.
Yesterday, he could still nitpick
a nickel. Now the winnowing of people waiting
for dinner. All that hunger.
My answers are as good as the terror from which songs are made. I listen
as he calls the dead on a broken phone and talks
for hours, what he remembers of searching, his searching
a rhythm that plays in my chest all night. I catch
the green goodbyes, the silty footing.
He carries broken birds.
These days I read inside
each shifting. How nearly I missed his softness.
Each Day Borrows Him
BY LAUREN CAMP
We have noon enough and that is all.
Along the walls, other men with eager names.
Now upstairs, the deck and plates of chicken.
We have between the sky and strainers.
The door no one mentions.
Minus such danger, lest he disappear. We have aides
and suffocations: the smeared sun.
We stand together and point though none of us agree
on the location of the parking lot.
Let’s be anecdotal: what he knew
is placed by the door, brooding.
Every day he awakes to his unshaped translation
of how adrift the air. The light switches.
We have switches. A round pill, a slitted oblong,
a palm for a minute. We return and turn
words by the fish, and watch the fish
in a wrapped portion of pauses. Later, I will know what to say
but then I tried to listen
to the purple transparent flowers
in a hundred liminal states.
I touch the top of his head where the rough spots
are no longer spilling. Nothing and everything—
confidential.
