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  • Winter of Tumult and Artifact
  • Lauren Camp (bio)

Again, I navigate to the throat of the ocean for audible guidance and to acquire primitive details from the fraught plummet and slender horizon: a chainlink, a stained Bible. I make peace with the innocent wielding. At the edge— a teaspoon, a sandal. A shearwater circles without anger and lightens, its wide wings, imperial, spread over the repetition of distance. The wind leaves its motion in filigreed sand, while out at the midpoint, an elliptical brooding. The water is full of itself and going nowhere every twelve hours, and I might be the only one to believe it or to be frightened. It commingles its salt with lost objects and spits out a metal button, the hook of an earring. The holy knife of water slices further. Not that this could be simplified to the inout of action, the efficient carving of portions. Not that anything is all farewell and return. Or all hunger. Every time I capture a hollow bleached bone, a yawning plastic bag, another token, who says there is focus? The grim light splashes up on me daily as I find the remnants of strangers—a small tin, a key still almost magenta. So it is pure reason to tend the endless wealth given by a thousand angles of light as water dances the riptide. Every day an epiphany of loosening tedium. Out of the ocean’s sleek windows, every vulnerable object seems to surrender. What I clutch is only a resemblance of yesterday’s losses claimed by the ocean’s euphoria, now docked in the slack at the shore. The cold is still luminous and preening. In the end, there is no end if you stand long enough beside it. [End Page 26]

Lauren Camp

Lauren Camp is the author of two collections, This Business of Wisdom (West End Press, 2010) and The Dailiness (Edwin E. Smith Publishing, 2013). Her third book, One Hundred Hungers, won the 2016 Dorset Prize from Tupelo Press. Her poems appear in Slice, World Literature Today, Beloit Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. Camp is a Black Earth Institute Fellow and the recipient of a National Federation of Press Women Poetry Book Prize, a Margaret Randall Poetry Prize, and an Anna Davidson Rosenberg Award. She hosts Audio Saucepan—a global music program interwoven with contemporary poetry—on Santa Fe Public Radio.

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