about the author
Lauren Camp is the author of two collections. Her third book, One Hundred Hungers, won the Dorset Prize (Tupelo Press, 2016). Her poems appear in Slice Magazine, The Seattle Review, World Literature Today, Hobart, and elsewhere. She is a Black Earth Institute Fellow, and also won a Margaret Randall Poetry Prize and an Anna Davidson Rosenberg Award. She produces and hosts “Audio Saucepan”—a global music program interwoven with contemporary poetry—on Santa Fe Public Radio.
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Not Quite Myself
Lauren Camp
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And the open door. And for days, weeks. Many times I’ve repeated my name to strangers, each syllable a pressure on my tongue—and they reply with sounds that seem dusted—with primary and secondary laughter. We only say who we’ve been somewhere else in the world—in those other houses, other temperatures, other corners—we only back and forth and thank you and after all. In response, I have learned to ask for excuse from the clamor—all their speech inside me: jagged and ripe. To understand instead the open door shrugged with sun. The register of voices vanishes in branches.