Poems Jennifer Camp Poems Jennifer Camp

Where Dreams Live

They stay with me for a few moments

after waking, the blurred pictures in 

my mind I had while dreaming, 

conversations so interesting I want 

to return to them to see how they end,

or decisions on the brink of being made

that would affect, you know, how we 

feel about each other. And I am sure, 

for those brief minutes between sleeping 

and waking, I am at my most powerful,

a masterful conductor of will as I 

attempt to stay present for this wild show, 

like I can control the actors in it, and 

by doing so, help them make choices 

that will be good (I pray, be kind!) but 

often I just watch the events unfold 

willy-nilly, mesmerized by the place 

where dreams live, in some static state, 

delineated by both reality and possibility, 

and I am realizing, as much as I do enjoy 

the show, the entertainment of watching 

myself in a scene both familiar and 

unknown and not being able to change

a script I’ve never been given, I like waking 

up even more, especially when the house

is still and I can tiptoe out to the kitchen, 

throw open wide the windows and inhale,

deep in my lungs, the sweet air of morning.

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Jennifer Camp Jennifer Camp

Your Photograph

You are beautiful

made beautiful

and I fall into studying your face, 

the stories I don’t know etched 

like promises like mystery,

like decisions to feel, not

numb and move forward 

forward anyway.

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Jennifer Camp Jennifer Camp

Little Boy | A Glimpse

I want to find other words to explain to you 

how memory weighs on me


the contour of skin over cheeks, 

puffing out like the sweetest apples

under deep blue eyes

where you hold me still, unable to move 

backward or forward because I 

don’t want to lose you again.

So I stay arrested, a willing captive because

 I can hear your voice, 

your  questions that make me feel

unqualified and yet determined

especially the one I have for you

—will you come back to me as more than

memory at the end of the world.

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Jennifer Camp Jennifer Camp

Angels

They are around me

illumined circles

of many bodies

around me

around me

the kiss of your lips on my cheek

and your tiptoes

thunder muted

as I love like you

taught me

I love what

you’ve taught me

with this band of gold

surrounding

one born from dust

and made glorious

your lips now mine

marked with song.

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Jennifer Camp Jennifer Camp

Reverie

All day this day she bends, knees pressed into mud, 

she dips her hands, cupping them like a bowl,

and pulls the water to her mouth

the rolling ocean within her

until she is small, submerged beneath sunlight,

gold ribbons wide as the sun,

and lets the waves pull her further,

their voices like children’s laughter in bustling, noisy rooms.

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Jennifer Camp Jennifer Camp

When You Were Five Years Old

How can I still feel attached

to you. Your hand runs time

backward and I stay to hold you. 

Sweetness folded into

where I’ve always kept

music and smells and memories.

All that has made me.

And I want to thank you for

my heart now shaped

into something beautiful.

Your small hand clasped

in mine. We walk together

where I will always see.

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Jennifer Camp Jennifer Camp

Journey

The walk through desert

was many miles,

each step a day,

and my legs ached

from the weight

of my body,

all the dreams of you 

a manifestation

I could see and touch

(if only in my

imagination) for

you were real to

me, a child to father

before I was a father,

and I had to trust

what I knew but did

not understand: you

were carrying me

even now my child

who loved, so loved, 

the world.

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Jennifer Camp Jennifer Camp

The Fine Line Between Melodrama and Disorientation

Sorrow tells me I will not find myself,

recover the place within me that knew

the ease of things, 

the trill of birds calling one to another,

exploding hope and promise,

while my knee aches

from overuse, I think,

and I hear the broken wall clock’s

minute-hand swing down to five-thirty

every six minutes while

my phone’s time  reads phantom numbers 

in the dark, and I wish I

were bike riding with you

in Amsterdam—or in Brugge when

we road outside the city to Damme and back, 

through countryside of sweet green and windmills

and a bicyclist hit a woman walking,

or she had a stroke,

 and people stopped to help her,

frail and disoriented, move off the path,

and we went as far as the path would let us,

one destination to another,

to accept going nowhere as a place

we no longer refuse to go.

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Jennifer Camp Jennifer Camp

Flailing / The Sheep’s Gate

I stand at the gate

watching you

wondering what you see

and imagine all sorts

of possible calamities

but not really

I actually don’t like

to imagine them

but I wonder

what you imagine

when the world you love

is motherless,

its arms stretching up

to be carried,

nestled deep and safe,

and it refuses to see

you standing there,

its mother who aches

to pick up its child

blind and flailing

desperate to be loved.

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Jennifer Camp Jennifer Camp

Clear Path

There is no risk. I follow you

through thickets that scratch my face

and tear my clothes. Not sure 

where I am or what road

leads up or down

and I am not afraid.

Nothing harms me

though I am powerless

on my own. You hedge

fingers, heart, mind, toes so

courageous does not 

describe who I am. 

Just finally 

weak, small,

indefatigable. 

Touch me and

I am no longer here.

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Jennifer Camp Jennifer Camp

Breath

The little boy presses up on me

his hot body and breath what 

I want to feel in the room

with chairs stacked too close

together as she reads poetry

from the front platform,

her hair wild and red and

covering her eyes like she is

embarrassed for us to hear

her words and I wonder

if I should care too

but the hot breath of sweet

air from the little boy’s mouth 

distracts me as it would

any mother so really I

never hear her anyway.

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Jennifer Camp Jennifer Camp

Hot Tamales

The wood slats of the chair push into the small of my back. I creep my fingers between the top of my desk in the back of the room, my fingertips memorizing a small box’s smoothness. It’s full of hot tamales I begged my mom to buy for me yesterday when we went to the store. The classroom has a hot-kid smell that fills the still air. The kids around me are bent over their desks, their pencils copying down spelling words on beige brown paper, not the good kind with clear blue lines and crisp whiteness, the kind with holes for binder rings, but the kind that is cheap and thin and tears easily with the rub of an eraser after you’ve made a mistake. You have to be careful. I watch Mrs. Lasley at her desk, cat-eye glasses pointed down as she grades papers, stapling a sticker in the top left corner for assignments deserving praise. We put them in our sticker boxes inside our desks. Scratch-n-sniff. Puffy. Fuzzy. Smooth. Shiny-metallic with glitter. I like them all. With both hands hidden, I punch a hole in the box with a pencil—it isn’t easy—and I wrap one finger and one thumb around one of the candies, caressing a single red pill before I bend my head and open my mouth and quickly pop it inside. It is chewy, stickier than I was prepared for. I can’t swallow it quickly. I must chew it, the stickiness gluing to my molars and the cinnamon burning my tongue. I imagine I am a dragon breathing fire from my nose. I am not relaxed. And then Mrs. Lasley, from her desk, speaks my name. She calls it out in the middle of the quiet and everyone looks up, curious and searching. Are you eating? Her eyes are on me. She is kind, the teacher I love. I tell her no. My face burning now. And she doesn’t press me. But her eyes penetrate me, seeing through me, seeing who I am. She believes I tell the truth or wants me to think I think she does. And I die a bit right then. Even now the effort to not lie to you is exhausting.

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Jennifer Camp Jennifer Camp

There Is No Risk

There is no risk. I follow you

through thickets that scratch my face

and tear my clothes. Not sure 

where I am or what road

leads up or down

and I am not afraid.

Nothing harms me

though I am powerless

on my own. You hedge

fingers, heart, mind, toes so


courageous does not 

describe who I am. 

Just finally 

weak, small,

indefatigable. 

Touch me and

I am no longer here.

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Jennifer Camp Jennifer Camp

Tethered

Who can say a dream is weightless,

without cost and measure,

a disturbance of time—

not actualized in action,

a belief that you are held by 

a single thread

of fragmentary imagination,

and pulling will amount to

breaking what could never stretch.

But this is no fragile dream,

an occasion to tiptoe and

tread with bare feet.

No, it is a time to push

out of the shadows

of daydream and seize

the dragon’s throat:

I will slay him now.

Watch this.

You ready?

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Jennifer Camp Jennifer Camp

Ache

(a response to Mary Oliver in her poem, “Messenger”)

You tell me my work in the world is gratitude

a bowing, a pointing to the sky

and noticing its blue

or the soft coat of a dog

or the timeless song of my children’s laughter

even as it fades

from memory, and you tell me to touch this heart’s ache

as it struggles to feel 

enough joy, enough pain, and wonder

as this world remembers when it was new and good

and beautiful.

And I disagree.

For my work is more than gratitude. It is remembering

his arms around me

and the celebration of birth and love and all things

good and pure.

And where home is—my work is remembering home and aching

for it to come again, back to me.

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Jennifer Camp Jennifer Camp

The Rebuilding

Who is to say how tall

the walls will be

when they crumble

around you,  a steep

crashing until the sky shouts

 them down. A desolate 

promise to rebuild

the ruins of you until

light blankets every crumb,

every torn place pulled

from the wreckage.

You have the tools.

Pull yourself up now.

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Jennifer Camp Jennifer Camp

To Love Oneself

I go to find you in the depths of me

as if that is a place to go

while I examine all the moments

of my life as if they are puzzle pieces

cut jaggedly from the whole, belonging unsure.

I want to cup the pieces in one hand,

run a finger over the rough edges,

sing lullabies to smooth their irregular shapes.

Maybe here we find home.

Maybe here we learn to be kind.

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Jennifer Camp Jennifer Camp

How Beautiful It Is

When the girls and boys in drama class gather

around each other in groups of five and three 

they are not pretending to be kind

like they know how to make love look

authentic better than we do

and I am mesmerized by their care

for one another, as well as their 

jocularity and their

comfortableness with quiet, 

the choice to not speak a word 

or paint their hair red or yellow or purple

or sing loud broadway tunes

or reach their arms around one another

when they are sad and cry

and I wonder

if I grasped this freedom when 

I was younger if I would not

observe love from afar but dance around it

and let it swallow me whole 

even while I melt with angst

and beg you to accept me just as I am

right now, 

how beautiful it is to be loved.

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Jennifer Camp Jennifer Camp

The Reconsidering

for J. O.

Describe it, the sound of a voice

cracking, a soul trembling

over the phone when it is just us two,

your voice and mine connecting

and we rely upon words to

heal, bring solace, offer a story to

make sense of what?

the reason why we choose

to protect ourselves from each other

at all cost and then feel the tearing open—

our tearing open,

self-preservation a thing of the past because

we don’t know how to do it now,

preserve what once was,

for there is sometimes (never)

a  going back to what once was

only letting shame kill

its children and regret

bury its dead

and letting pain billow

in undulations

(keep feeling don’t stop feeling)

until it strengthens us

and we are not what we once were,

look, look, at the fire burning now.

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