Corn and Turns

By LAUREN CAMP

 

If I won’t remember that I was in Virginia last year without praise
of darkness, or the autumn drift I spent in Wisconsin watching a cardinal

nip the oak, if I see and forget field thick over field, the stalks
cut against green—how will I fetch forth the half-dead

memory of the 6 train stuffing its way into the Bronx, as it rolled the same
every day over the florist and the florist’s locked gate, over

the circle of urban dirt and suits, and my father emerging
from the chaos at six-eleven pm? My father snugging down the metal,

down to our Buick in a patchwork of misaligned streets. Won’t hold
that he always got in on the right with his noise, and now I

never will remember exactly what he said, the layers
of accent crumpled in, and his questions and crusts of amusement that blew

out. Look at all the forgetting I’ve done, all that I thought I would
always know, though I knew even then the next day

his worn loafers would plod up the stairs to the platform.
I’d hear him go away from us. Again, go above.

 

Lauren Camp is the author of five books, most recently Took House. Her poems have appeared in Kenyon Review, Poem-a-Day, New England Review, and Blackbird. Honors include the Dorset Prize and finalist citations for the Arab American Book Award, the North American Book Award, and the New Mexico-Arizona Book Award. Her poems have been translated into Mandarin, Turkish, Spanish, and Arabic. Learn more at LaurenCamp.com.

[Purchase Issue 23 here.]

From the beginning, The Common has brought you transportive writing and exciting new voices. We are committed to supporting writers and maintaining free, unrestricted access to our website, but we can’t do it without you. Become an integral part of our global community of readers and writers by donating today. No amount is too small. Thank you!

Corn and Turns

Related Posts

Cover of All Is The Telling by Rosa Castellano

An Embodied Sense of Time: Raychelle Heath Interviews Rosa Castellano

ROSA CASTELLANO
I’m holding a blank page all the time for myself. That’s a truth that I choose to believe in: the blank page is a tool for our collective liberation. It can be how we keep going. I love that we can find each other on the page and heal each other, too. So, I invoke that again and again, for myself, because I need it.

Cloudy sunset over field.

Florida Poems

EDWARD SAMBRANO III
I will die in Portland on an overcast day, / The Willamette River mirroring clouds’ / Bleak forecast and strangers not forgetting— / Not this time—designer raincoats in their closets. / They will leave for work barely in time / To catch their railcars. It will happen / On a day like today.