A Poem by Lauren Camp

Goodbye to Aggressions and Generous Gestures

Every visit he didn’t and didn’t and then could
able less. This was an extravagant
minimum we’d come to expect. Winter is endless

tight branches. I remember his voice as a nation, all the doors
shutting and us eating
our behaviors. Sorry citizens. Evenings, the street
                                                            loosed out my small windows.
                                       Name something that seems perfect.

I’m telling you my father’s silence, every mobbing of it. Not telling
the clamor for days of unused parts
of our hope. Kafka wrote A cage went in search of a bird.

I don’t know if I’m lonely.
                                       Name the doorway, then walk through.

Not to tongue more than he can, I hurry to listen. With vanishing,
he has removed each pronoun of home. He still wants
                                       to name
                                       swerve and siege, pause and anthem.

I sit beside him in the thrift and watch it froth.
Love is a habit. Then a moon. A spatter
of color priming the treetops. I laugh about the moon. He laughs.

When he laughs, there is so much
of him—multiple pieces: and, of, or, if. What are our names?

                                       The lock, the solution. Name it all.

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Lauren Camp is the author of four poetry collections. Her poems appear in Boston Review, Pleiades, Slice, DIAGRAM, The Los Angeles Review, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of the Dorset Prize, a Black Earth Institute fellowship, residencies from Willapa Bay AiR and The Taft-Nicholson Center, and a finalist citation for the Arab American Book Award.