to need to be without yesterday and it’s only a summer
of time before what erases is afternoons
and evenings and his patience is constantly
erasing, but that day we rode
his kisses all the way to the hallway carpet
from the elevator, all of its distances
that will remain on my lips and my sister’s
good smile—slight—which kept on becoming
a face. We had just returned from our trip backward
past blue buildings and vents. We stood in standing
water because it was at the bottom
of our view and we needed to be
burled to a man who keeps a hat
in a pouch and three bandages to shell the top
of his head. We listened to his memory haggle
its dusky noises, the hexagonal wasting taking no time
and forever. Each thought was an aroma
we tasted and we said with our breath
come in, take us up. That day
we went to a medical office
and sat as the fluorescence winnowed
to green while the doctor chased the dredge
on his head. I stood as they cauterized.
My father was stiff from the scrape
of all truth, and it pained to see
the material of his face, wincing. To stir up
such trembling. Minutes went on, recently empty,
and more filled with futures. We took him
back to his steady bedtime, to the red walker
folding into his selected elder woman. His brain is seasoned
to tenderness. He gave us those kisses and we turned
our shoulders deep into him, realized we made it
this far. We knew soon we’d be to the horse
of his mind and what it chooses to nestle, to eat—
his hierarchies of losses and outbursts, the far objects
and systems of repetition, days crying
with daylight, where everyone lowers their heads.
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Lauren Camp is the author of five books, most recently Took House (Tupelo Press). Honors include the Dorset Prize and finalist citations for the Arab American Book Award, Housatonic Book Award, North American Book Award, National Indie Excellence Award, and New Mexico-Arizona Book Award. Her poems have appeared in New England Review, Witness, Poet Lore, and Beloit Poetry Journal, and her work has been translated into Mandarin, Turkish, Spanish, Serbian and Arabic.
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Joe Lugara took up painting and photography as a boy after his father discarded them as hobbies. His works depict odd forms and objects, inexplicable phenomena, and fantastic dreamscapes, taking as their basis horror and science fiction films produced from the 1930s through the late 1960s. He began creating digital paintings in the 2010s; they debuted in a 2018 solo exhibition at the Noyes Museum of Art in his home state of New Jersey. His work has been featured in several publications and has appeared in more than 40 exhibitions in the New York Metropolitan Area, including the New Jersey State Museum and 80 Washington Square East Galleries at New York University.
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