We sit on the porch as tuneless cars repeat
their litany in distant atmosphere. Just out of reach,
grasshoppers are mutating to locusts and the moon
swings between trees, then slowly falls on my man
with blue eyes who says in a blanket of quiet
that his sister in Seattle locked herself in her office
with three students while a shooter was out spraying
the campus. They stayed bent under that horizon
until dusk found their desks. Night comes on,
and the mornings are again ordinary. There is no
removing a shadow. He and I look up to stars
gullied in indigo. Our nameless paradise fills
with small peaks of wind. The wind hums
its warmth. The candle on our rough table flames.
Lauren Camp is the author of three books, most recently One Hundred Hungers, winner of the Dorset Prize (Tupelo Press, 2016). Her poems have appeared in New England Review, Poetry International, At Length, Beloit Poetry Journal, and as a Poem-a-Day for Poets.org. Other literary honors include the Margarte Randall Poetry Prize, the Anna Davidson Rosenberg Award, a Black Earth Institute Fellowship.
