☀ Today's Poem: "Must Learn Neither" Lauren Camp

I had plundered past nervous. A tense Walmart truck clanging the interstate. Smoke
gnawing the face of some mountain. America, aromatic

with ravages. In schism. Sacrificed. I stayed
woke most nights near the door. Occupied with every handle. Four years

my father had gone from corridor to quiver and I mustered my saddle
to get to him often. Four years of crinkled conversing.

Yes, and ginger. I shivered through rooms
of my home in the desert with its stoic astonishments

and took on some needles. I couldn't settle the ache.
The curt country and my family. Every ache size, every shape.

To reset, I've come to the distance, to watch the ocean repeat
how to unfinish. I brought with me a light jacket and a thick book

about Agnes Martin. I'm not sure
why I packed it, what it celebrates, but I know the artist

and her simple lines against excess. Know she made
sacred an emptiness. Maybe I'll hear thin strands of refuge

apart from the chaos that circles. What I want
is nothing. No meaning, no matter, no more. I've run away

with the most fragile questions. Haggard
in a small room big enough for a bed

with its modest blanket. I let my watch doze on the sill.
Minor details hurtle over grasses. A windribbed fence.

The land around me tugs. I don't know it. Fog covers.
Blank space consumes me.

I figure every day I'll navigate to the tail end of this small town
with its translucent leavings. What I want to figure out

is what could be in the neithers. I am entering
a conversation with Agnes for no reason I yet understand. I am not looking

to rivet to her, but to be extracted
from the sharp cuff of politics, of dementia-tweaked presence, of the gravity

of a future that keeps rolling toward me. How do you recover
from a decisive wound? A line, a line: it never leaves you.