3 p.m. Lauren Camp

Shelter moves along with the ravens who cap the trees all black and in copies. We agree that a vulgar December was made from our boots. I see god isn’t at war in the middle of this exhausted place, not so long as we fill it with multiple pieces of our ongoing fiction. What I want most to remember is the calm of the mules undressed to the grass that keeps growing. Let this become my lasting investigation of this reduced moment. I’ll put in my magic square all the impossible numbers, the melting point of ice and have you heard the Brunt Ice Shelf is broken? What isn’t broken? Even Wednesday or people. I will come to you with my sentences and as many commas as I can wedge to each thought: myself and you and supplicant. Myself and the hinges and my negative enthusiasm, thirsty and lunatic. Can I prove the great grief is more than gathering suggestions? I’ve been told there are four solutions to worry. That’s what I’ll do with the hours of today. See the empty window as how I admire the emptiness best. What happens each time is the dusk, a currency I know how to spend. The weight of the clocks and each circumference of sky. Three trees make a limit. Here is our area and perimeter. I stay wrapped in small sweaters on this property cut through the mountains. The absence of road.

When my daughter was in preschool, she got to spend a dollar every Christmas getting presents for us. There was a whole little shop set up for them to choose things from, and volunteer parents who paired with them to help them find things.

When I picked my daughter up from school with all her gift bags, the other parent who had been her shopping companion told me “Oh my gosh, your present, I… When you open it I have a story for you.”

I was puzzled, but on Christmas Day when I opened a wine travel mug, like a wine glass encased in a plastic travel mug, I began to understand. Apparently when this other parent was helping my daughter look through the wares on offer she suggested, “Does your mom like wine?” And my daughter’s eyes lit up and she gasped and said, “Yeah, she LOVES wine!” Given that I had no idea what legal things one can get up to with a wine travel mug, I thanked my daughter, took pictures of it for my family and friends, and put it high in a kitchen cabinet, where it remained unused.

But then this one day I went to the dentist, and I had a panic attack. I have some strange issues with anaesthesia . . . I’ve heard rumors it might be a redhead thing. Whatever the case, in the months leading up to this fateful dentist appointment I had multiple experiences of anaesthesia not working and doctors not understanding when I tried to explain it and proceeding with incredibly painful procedures.

So when I needed a cavity filled and I felt a jolt of pain after the novacaine should have set in, my brain went haywire. The dentist was very nice and did his best, but in the midst of my panic I was metabolizing the novacaine so fast that he had to give me more shots of it and ended up immobilizing the entire right half of my lower jaw. I had to make an appointment to come back and fill the other one, because he couldn’t also immobilize the other side or I’d be drooling on myself for hours.

On the way home I sent a message to one of my best friends who is a therapist and told her that I had just had a panic attack at the dentist and, like, what on earth was wrong with me I was in my mid-thirties, or something to that effect.

She told me I should drink some wine, that having a glass of it would lessen the likelihood that the memory of the dentist panic attack would become traumatic.

This sounded like a great plan to me, so I went home and poured a glass of wine to take to the bedroom while I tried to come back to myself. This was my first panic

attack, so I wasn’t sure what else to do. The problem was I couldn’t drink the wine because I couldn’t purse my lips. I tried once or twice and got it all over myself. And then, I looked up into that seldom disturbed top cabinet at my wine travel mug and I realized its time had come.

How porous, the borders between us. The warmth, the very body heat radiating from one person’s fingers depressing the characters on a screen that spell out TRY SOME WINE, that warmth encoded, sent, reconstituted under my own fingers, and then wine and another person’s wisdom down my own throat and into my body. All this aided by the spark of joy in a small girl that an adult could see and recognize, mirror neurons perhaps at work in that brief moment so that between them they chose a present. It is no simple thing to say where one person ends and another begins.

She learned when she was forty-two that guinea pigs can get scurvy. For most people this tidbit of information would be classified as trivia, one of millions and millions of discrete bits of information clogging different corners of the internet and overwhelming our poor, unadapted brains. Or perhaps for a person who owned guinea pigs, it would be a useful and necessary thing to know--ensure your guinea pig gets regular vitamin c because like us they cannot store it and otherwise they will go the way of unfortunate sailors on the high seas hundreds of years ago.

But for her, this fact was an indictment. She learned it because she had just purchased her son a pair of guinea pigs as starter pets on the way to the dog he desperately wanted and they had gone to the library’s children nonfiction section looking for guinea pig care books at his reading level, and the book they brought home said that guinea pigs can get scurvy.

She, at her son’s age, had had a guinea pig, which is perhaps why it occurred to her to get him guinea pigs as well. She had not known, at twelve, that guinea pigs could get scurvy. She had fed her guinea pig, whose name had been nutmeg, pellets in a bowl that her parents got at the pet store. Nutmeg had lived for five years without ever receiving a vitamin c supplement or having her nails clipped or getting the fresh hay that apparently was also supposed to be available constantly in unlimited quantities. She hadn’t known. Her parents hadn’t tried to find out, and neither had she. At forty two, this tortures her.

In the first flush of horror at her unknowing neglect of nutmeg, she tried to tell herself that it had been a different time, that relations with pets and animal care in general had been a different thing when she was a child, that there were things that simply weren’t known and weren’t practiced and the shame involved in treating an animal so poorly could thus be spread across the entirety of humanity and shared. But the library book, with its dated photographs of children with bowl haircuts belied this assessment, and she looked at the copyright page and saw that the book proclaiming that guinea pigs can get scurvy and including helpful, detailed charts of the vitamin c content of various fresh vegetables, was written in 1977.

“Mom,” said her son from the couch where he was sitting with his tablet as the guinea pig book open to its title page still lay in her hands. “Guess what. In Europe it’s illegal to have one guinea pig because they can die of loneliness.”

I will do it right this time, she thinks, holding a tiny, squirming forepaw in one hand and a nail clipper in the other. In the middle of the night she opens the bag of hay as quietly as possible while her son sleeps nearby and adds a few more handfuls to the pile, to be sure the guinea pigs have enough to make it to morning. This time, I will do it right.

for Amy

Some people know how to pray and some people write poems but I’ve been told by people who know that in the end they are the same thing. Both sing. Both are trying to find their fragrance, reaching for something beyond them, rising incense.

This poem is reaching for the ocean, bringing its vastness to the prairie, making the grass wave like water, Letting the sun glance off each leaf and stalk in ripples and diamond glints, everything dancing, everything roaring.

This poem is reaching for borders it cannot see, filling in the unfillable, rushing towards and past and around so that all the things that separate us are now only this field away.

This poem is reaching for the warmth of the sun and the warmth of friends all in one place again. This poem is the sun on your skin: soaking, warming, stretching with you for that place and time where there is nothing but light buoying you in salt arms, the waves rolling you but always holding you up.

after Liesel Mueller

I bring a cottonwood seed about to molt, a papery feather laying in my hand like a promise.

Nature always suffers quietly—its bravery in never flinching from what’s opening it.

She collects nothing for herself, instead allows memory to paint her a red-gold brilliance

at a distance. How strange that recollection is a garden growing wild, a bramble, where

a stone path steps through time, each green branch catching at your heel, your body marked, and made.

after Liesel Mueller

It stretches the pine branch that cannot read, curiously climbing the library wall. It stays green and awake, through the winter. It vibrates the slant of light beneath the wooden bridge above the creek, rounded over the spring water, holding silence like a golden cup. It hummed in the color of a woman’s dress before love arrived, a spell knit into the fabric, as if cast saying, you will remember.

Paths through the woods turn silently when there is no reason to speak, our feet on the dust a language of their own. In the cupped ironwood, held. In the necessary answer, unspoken. It is unseekable, cannot be found, only eavesdropped on, the way you listen at a door for a visitor. Or in that moment of anger find your body turning back, soft again and ready, settling on your face like snow in a spring storm.

I want the smell of dew before it freezes, fresh

snowberries, frost-ripe distant mountains pile

closer every day. Sometimes I collect movie ticket stubs,

down jackets, chai tea, anything to keep me warm until

sage creeps up the forest paths, until you come home.

I miss the scent of new dirt under my fingernails,

soft earth after a hard winter, dog breath panting warm

against my palms. I feel you now, bright like perennial stonecrop,

purple peony, hot June afternoons in the backyard drinking

pop - its taste, sweet as any memory against my teeth.