Lauren Camp

Crossing a Border

Here, the bare pith of remarks under the tarpaulin.

Buses on rutted streets. An armload

of yesterday and the weight of what we say.

Heat is black-winged, ordinary. The walls hum

in any pitch of accusing.

What we have we’ve scraped with us

through countries and dropped.

We are not saying anything,

a temporary miracle

of inarticulate language.

The flat clammy heat is four-color.

We are still standing. Narrow,

slowed to unneeding. A black dog stares

at the wounds. We look straight

ahead, ignoring whatever

we witness. How the folded, worn bills

vector their palms. Our eyes

arrive at the weak distance. No one watches us

and everyone follows our motions.

How far we’ve traveled

to hear the birds,

to lie down in lampblack still healing

from diodes of sun, to build again

the capacity for nothing more

than the famine

and floor plan around us, the territory

of tar, the sun again weeping.

How easy our duties. Of all

we could carry, the luck

that no one wants a whole story.

LAUREN CAMP is the author of four books. Her poems appear in Poetry International, Pleiades, Poet Lore, the bilingual anthology 12 Poetas and elsewhere, and have been translated into Mandarin, Turkish, Spanish and Arabic. She has received the Dorset Prize, fellowships from Black Earth Institute and The Taft-Nicholson Center, and finalist citations for the Arab American Book Award and the New Mexico-Arizona Book Award. www.laurencamp.com