Lauren Camp

one poem

A Gesture of Leaving and Going On

And something already is that still will be.
—William Bronk

Through streets narrow and strewn I went toward
a friend I’d not met. I went after days

in many rooms split to stone, with heads
and urns and bird bones. After our conversations of smaller

concentrics, and immobile serpents, and hustling heat, I went
for epiphany—through that day when we’d walked four times

past blooms, speaking wings and insects
and trees burdened in petal. I needed to leave to know

the light talk of fact. The city had glossed
with a quarter moon, and I crossed those narrow streets to reach

for the sound of inhalation again. I had that first glass to exist,
to be idle, and another to tell the mind its mourning

was done. Bells spilled with exuberance and you found me in the open
house of lemon scents, the sap

of succulence, a safe man damp
and silvery beside me, mistaking me for attention, and after

when I was in the same pink shirt, night’s ease
swung by. I doubted I could walk the stones, but you held me

as I slapped my palm to each wall. The city was aimless
inside my head, waving. The far side

of our argument finally done. Of course it was all
gorgeous or at least the colors

on hinges kept swooning, the evening a given,
the grates and deities, and beside you, unfocused, I mattered.

Lauren Camp is the author of five books, most recently Took House (Tupelo Press, 2020), which Publishers Weekly calls a “stirring, original collection.” Her poems and interviews have appeared in Witness, Poet Lore, The Rumpus, Kenyon Review, The Los Angeles Review and other journals in the US and abroad. The recipient of a fellowship from the Black Earth Institute, Camp was awarded the Dorset Prize and finalist citations for the Arab American Book Award, the Housatonic Book Award and the New Mexico-Arizona Book Award. Her poems have been translated into Mandarin, Turkish, Spanish, and Arabic. www.laurencamp.com