Lauren Camp
Gold-mining the Cold
For Sonya Kelliher-Combs
Shira Zaid / Wastefall
One woman looks through the past and packages
the mandible. The ox, the infinite sky, a part
of the heart and bone of Alaska. She holds each
frost-adapted privacy—teeth as landscape,
hair that lives as roots, the perilous sweater
of winter. She tenders the hunted gut and mist
and patient touch with order. Don't beg catastrophe
to find meaning: feathers, skin, quill, membrane.
A woman whispering solitude from the coldest garden.
Her fingerprints run along fur and antler when storm
is a gnaw. Only remnants account for a palette.
Lauren Camp is the author of five books, most recently Took House (Tupelo Press, 2020), which Publishers Weekly calls a “stirring, original collection.” Her writing has appeared in The Los Angeles Review, Pleiades, Witness, Poet Lore, and other journals. Honors include the Dorset Prize and finalist citations for the Arab American Book Award, the Housatonic Book Award and the New Mexico-Arizona Book Award. Her work has been translated into Mandarin, Turkish, Spanish, and Arabic. www.laurencamp.com.
Shira Zaid is a multimedia artist focusing on poetry, film, photography and movement. She is a sophomore at Smith College studying art history, film and ethics. She is deeply inspired by the points of connection present in all living things. She currently resides in Asheville, North Carolina, where she spends most of her time contemplating that special feeling of infinity most frequently found in art.