The Bowl

by Lauren Camp

Years ago I was friends with a woman who owned a turquoise house on a street that contracted between downtown and what in the city was lost. For a short period, she took in a renter. In the long operation of finance and who assumes what, the second woman, the one who did not own the home with its carved art and tin-plated cupboards, was tasked instead of rent, with making salads for each evening’s hunger. The lettuce torn to frills and crinkled in and blistered potatoes, peppers slendered to a vast ceramic blue bowl. And from the spouted vessel she held, the necklace of dressing with its maple and tang freed down like pearls. One night I was there for the ceremony, the layer of each mouth-sized piece in the bowl. And then we ate—

Today, I sit at table with friends who were last week strangers. An upswept natter moves through, touches us each and our seats below branches. A dish of blueberries has been placed on the table. What is worth mentioning? A deer passed slow by our table. One woman is sad about some action and tears sing by her eyes for a minute. With nothing else to hold but the berries she picks them up and holds them, one by one dropping them into her palm. Round and slow. It is summer, the end of summer. There is no periphery to memory, just a bowl, the feeling of staying put long enough to see something glistening. Something let go.

A Spell Addressed to a Friend

by Lauren Camp

How firm the period is to thought. I stand and smooth the sheets. Some days the cranes draw close in rustling. I watch two people sitting on a step. Catch only laughter. A machine in the house makes a chime. Some days the fog nearly hisses. Every day wrench and echo, ask and tense. The people outside are taken together. In breeze. It is a loose autumn. That uncertain red truck still clings to the side of the road. The people who had gone to the beach had gone and swum and got home and are now curled into spaces fallow and slow. All the time I am doing my expressions. Time with its profound emptiness, its skim against corners, its camera. As long as it doesn’t hurt. Does it hurt? At the sand, a woman suggests to her child to take a rock to the water to make a wish. The water flips over again. Maybe it is trapped. Or maybe passing to an absence is a way to prepare for what is next. I follow the memory of it. I feel loyal to where it was. Call it home, that weak system. Mind its murmur. We could do that—close and open. And not know tomorrow’s point of view, the ongoing calendar of ancestors, equivalence, and farther on. How many hours I keep writing to you. The sky runs along at ease in the barren. Not fretting. Low music. Solving for motion.

Lauren Camp served as the second New Mexico Poet Laureate. She is the author of nine books of poetry, most recently Is Is Enough (Texas Review Press, 2026) and In Old Sky (Grand Canyon Conservancy, 2024), which grew out of her experience as Astronomer-in-Residence at Grand Canyon National Park and won the New Mexico Book Award. Her poems have been translated into Mandarin, Turkish, Spanish, French, and Arabic. www.laurencamp.com.