Lauren Camp's poems have been published in THE Magazine, Southwest Women's Poetry Exchange, All as One, Impetus and Crosswinds Weekly, among other journals. She has read her poetry on Gary Glazner's "Poetry Talk" on KSFR-FM, and on "All That Jazz" and "Women's Focus" on KUNM-FM. Her best gig was reading two poems that accompany her visual art, a series entitled "The Fabric of Jazz," with the Southwest Jazz Orchestra at the Albuquerque Museum in the summer of 2006. She is working on her first book of poetry. More about Lauren and her work can be found at www.laurencamp.com.

I TELL ME OF MYSELF

To understand you have to start somewhere. I choose to pull at my skin first,
to see my pores. I want a way in, a way to slip behind the wind.

You must know that I'm a liar. We all are. I wear it on my sleeve
and nothing happens to me. I listen to myself on the tape deck in the car.
I love long journeys because I love my voice.

I need myself to illumine a quiet day
in a quiet place on a dirty road in the middle of nowhere.
I like it like this. I can take inventory of myself without interruption
and that makes me giddy.

Sometimes I wonder how you'll see me but then I remember that you're not here.
When I am with me, I'm not crowded. I swing my arms wide, reach up,
whisper caressing words to the oak tree and the starlings.
I billow out in sensible waves of satisfaction.

Today I will be careless.
I will wander over my land and grab at recklessness with my toes,
I will pull leaves off the sumac
and they will turn into a prayer, a wish. And yes, I will dream.

What I find, I will spread out:
a faintly colored eggshell, a dead rabbit, a sign from God, a letter,
my intuition, the calmness of my isolation.

SLOW

eyes open, legs splayed in the powdery dirt,
she likes the cool of it, the dynamic surge
of just belonging to a place like this,
brown and barren and slow as rust.

she digs deeper with her toes and hums,
when the sun crests the kitchen window
she catches fragments of light on her thumb
and drags her hand across her chin like buttercups.

this will be the year the piñons die,
the year the tamarisks stretch inches to the core,
the year she goes away - and then returns
to find the worms still multiplying.

maybe there is no final resolution,
yesterday is how it will be again tomorrow,
the earth will slowly crust into tenacious particles,
the stillness cradled inside like a newborn.

ON THE AIR

On Mondays I am improvised.
I am something else.

On Mondays there is nothing
but music, drums, the wooden wail
of the clarinet

the whizz of sound
through a microphone,
the pop of thought.

Breath balances talking
to an empty room, an entire city

vinyl crackles,
turning, turning

the shine of words emerge and stack
into gleaming sentences

while knobs, discs and levers
run, move, slither, start and fade.

The music foams in my ears
and pulses out into the streets
and into cars

the reeds are warm,
the brass insistent,
a quiet lonely walking bass.

At noon my shift is over
and the calm returns.
At noon I am myself again.

THE LIVING (FOR REGINALD GAMMON)

Last week I lost my friend Reggie.
I meant to call before he broke apart
into his own random bits of color,
twelve revolutions away.

The smell of the living stops
at the edge of a circle,
at the end of a phone line.
One limited life leads into another
like waves of music.

THE BOX

I folded the sweetness of summer into a cardboard box
that once held the remains of my mother's childhood.

First a side bent over, then another. The box is what is left
of deck chairs and wounded fingers, of concrete meandering
and truth. The box is filled with lies.

Pressed down another side, bent the last to the first,
angling down and in until the open space was dark.

The box is not that big. A gray din like honking trumpets
seeps out of it now that it is closed.

The sounds have the illusion of being unlimited, angular
and disparaging, jarring colors of luxury and innocence at the same time.

The marks I make on the box with my nervous fingers
are pathways to my insides. They are my childhood as waves,
drunken dreams, bubbles of quiet talk, the unspooling of understanding.

They are beds in the attic, mice in the walls, watermelon rinds sucked dry
of sweetness. They are the woolen heat of yesterday.

One day I will slice across tape, peel back edges,
open the box, study what doesn't exist.

THE HUG

When his sister stopped talking
she birthed despair for the third time.

She was submerged in the stretch
but her mind stayed tight and focused.

The clock descended on her heartbeat then.
His words flowed together through her eyes

and blurred her perfect thoughts.
After a year, her red madras top rubs

against the crisp cotton covering his scar.
and she wraps the words around him like a tourniquet.

The hug lasts for two hundred screaming tears.
Later, he gives up, says blood is not thick enough to love.

A BOX OF OBSTACLES

I spent nine months building a box of obstacles, a container
of reminders and mirrored dimensions
and bent places for problems I couldn't manage

but I couldn't slice the glass or weld the joints,
the ends didn't meet and the air seeped out
and all the patience I had collected fizzled through a hole
in the window on a bitter morning in January.

I went home to listen for the rim of a trombone
and watch the light scrape sideways
onto the back of my hand,
to feel the hard outer shell of a roly-poly bug.

THE BOOK OF BIRD (FOR CHARLIE PARKER)

It is difficult, facing the wind, an audience of disbelief. It is not
impossible to soar. The bird sings in rapid wingbeats,
and squeals, croaks and warbles through the tree branches of his nation.
The melody of his flight, the rhythm of speed is color and shape,
lines to nowhere.

All the beauty is concentrated in the voice. All his tortured,
searing beauty is shouted in chromatic tones that thrust him up,
lift into the sun. The flight is full of ancient magic
and lyric euphoria from another world, a world I haven't known.

Higher intervals trill above my head, become dreams
with blisters of nuance. The music of the bird: the whisper of wings,
the repeating cry splits the night's dirty blues, twists and loops
through everything that exists around me.

The flight is all of it,
once the bird lands, the song is over.

(In 1890, Eugene Schieffelin dreamed of Shakespeare's birds warbling their 'Old World' songs on the tree branches of his nation, so he released 80 starlings from England into the skies of New York City's Central Park.)

MARY LOU'S BIBLE OF THE SKIES (FOR MARY LOU WILLIAMS)

She slices up the circle of heaven
into twelve thin prayers,
divinations to her peers.

The skies are explained in resonances
through a filter of keys
as she listens to the angels
create sound between the stars,

Aries to Pisces.
She patterns tones
around the gospel of music
and the endless sphere of planets.

Worship is enacted
in a complete circuit,
the zodiac infused with harmony
and glorious meditation

on the holy spirit of jazz
and the abode of god,
the moon and sun,
circular thought and salvation of souls.

GRIEF

She lays down and weeps.
It's a brilliant weeping,
a valiant use of judicious space,
comfort with the unknown,

the line above
teetering
on swooping dreams beneath,
pools of silence so deep
they empty the dark within her eyes.
The stars are falling.

Her tears collect footsteps
of grief gone distant
and fill ancient holes
with a sweetness so picante,
so sharp, that some things are lost
and I cannot tell you which.

I tell her, listen,
I will lick your tears
and grasp your meaning
in my own strong hands.

Listen, three mountains over
from the left breast
is a hair leading down a flight
of marble steps
to a wide open mind,

three mountains over
is a serene calm.
I know you will reach
that third mountain.