Drift and Current

My father wakes at dawn to complain
about the eggs. Every yolk
is a microscope

he can’t see through. Nothing any longer
is urgent. Now new tangles and we

adjust to the front desk
and endless
average aspirations. He becomes buddies

with dusk. So do we—

to distract him.
When he sat watching the winglets, elsewhere

was all substance, and it was halved
and doubled to glaucous trembling shields. He nodded

his brain and told me the phrasebook
of his destination.
We were in it

for the long haul. My father sat and I
sat beside him, a single cell beside

a single cell,
in the lunatic creases of air.

LAUREN CAMP is the author of four books, most recently Turquoise Door and One Hundred Hungers, winner of the Dorset Prize. Her poems have appeared in Poem-a-Day (The Academy of American Poets), Slice, and Poetry International, among other journals, and in the anthologies Ghost-Fishing (University of Georgia Press, 2018) and 12 poetas (Ediciones La Herrata Feliz, 2017). She is the recipient of a Black Earth Institute fellowship, residencies from Willapa Bay AiR and The Mabel Dodge Luhan House, and a finalist citation for the Arab American Book Award. www.laurencamp.com

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