Two Turned Ways
In the desert the wind mounts and locks behind us.
And ravens roof and rise and loop, ubiquitous
then dip down for miles to grab anything dirty.
A mixture of temptations.
We keep discussing the thieving, the stains.
Another hour of people brimming with vanity
while some of us struggle with our sovereign sad hearts.
The roosters swing their shoulders
in the shed at the slow end of the hill
and you might think there’s nothing left
undone but the country, the country, the poison extraordinary.
I trudge back to bed. Sleep is what I came here for.
I wake late to the guts of dawn,
the greedy again rotten with triumph.
This is the likely mess we’ve come to believe in.
Reductions. The world goes on breaking.
At night my love and I speak our breath to each other:
our house, our solution. No one can tell us to stop.
by Lauren Camp, first published in Rise Up Review
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Editor’s Note: The images in this poem are ominous and worrisome, and this cascade of difficult imagery imbues the poem with a sense of both urgency and trauma.
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