Cut to the Quick

For years we let him take hold of the table and complain

all those rapid-stream target-lists until the habit

was scratched in. Once in a while after this harrow

we speculated that he pleasured in such knots, in these barbs

of offenses. He wanted to string us the longwork of angst, to calculate

and commemorate all the misspent we’d incurred. Such outrage

formed the alphabet he dragged through us

for decades until phrases fishhooked his mouth, until

what he’d held had caught in the double back

of pauses—his voice trimmed to flailings. We let him

tip to the wake of his slips, let him use them as anchor.

After some weeks       the spaces grew           swampy.

Nothing           to that, we said. We were       happy he’d left

the scorching behind               to stand           in the sum      

                           of his calm. So what,

         we fashioned, pretty      quick… and we                       lied

to ourselves                    about absence. Against     the new silence we

faltered.

      He             wasn’t  this and wasn’t            that, and we

                        turned

toward

         what we’d hoped          

                                                would be the next squall.

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Lauren Camp served as New Mexico’s 2^nd Poet Laureate (2022-25) and is the author of eight books of poetry, including One Hundred Hungers (Tupelo Press, 2016), finalist for the Arab American Book Award and winner of the Dorset Prize, In Old Sky (Grand Canyon Conservancy, 2024), which grew out of her experience as Astronomer-in-Residence at Grand Canyon National Park, and Is Is Enough (Texas Review Press, 2026). Camp’s poems have been translated into Mandarin, Turkish, Spanish, French, and Arabic. www.laurencamp.com