​Lauren Camp

I am being invited into the vicinity

of the dream. All night, I lug my undone revivals
into an equivalent realm. Without pressure my primal self turns
 
and I mumble—then sit up, still knuckled under
and call the scene out, shaping
 
fine flourishes, repeated shadows. It is all
such a wreck and perfect shelter: the gaze of reassembling
 
a day. I sleep to see a length of ghosts
chancing the urgent, but wake with unrehearsed answers.
 
All morning: thick clumps of sun.
The hours take their lurching and I regain my history.
 
My hands put down the scissors
eight years ago, and since then, nine people I love
 
have died. Bless again the dark. I slip inside
after much time naming our current apocalypse. I tender
 
the circuit of sleep, the infinite permission to cut off
each sadness. Dislocation: night after night I’ll gather its pieces.
​

--
Lauren Camp's fifth book of poems, Took House, will be published by Tupelo Press in 2020. Her poems have appeared in The Los Angeles Review, Pleiades, Poet Lore, Slice, DIAGRAM, and other journals. Winner of the Dorset Prize, she has also received fellowships from 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.