Minimal Absorption, and: Best Song

Abstract

Minimal Absorption, and: Best Song Lauren Camp (bio) Minimal Absorption One day the daughter who pays attention witnesses the worst thing.The next day a small amount more. The father no longer looks at her. He looks at the heater; he pushesup and down triangles. The heater gurgles a message.Light pours a long time from the man’s window. The daughter takes some photos and the father smiles.Lips only up on the left. He keeps waking to learn cracked facts.She hears him look at his memory. “I was born in Florida.” “No, you were born in Baghdad. You slept on the roof.”Seam, hunger, sermon, siren.With fat markers he colors the middles of everything inseparable. The other daughter pins these swirls and leaves to the wall of his room.Is he accent, grassy knoll, passwords to heaven? The father sleeps whether it is day or night.Phrases, gouges. Elsewhere, someone’s definitions. * The emperor is perfect, her acupuncturist explains,laying a gold needle barely on the daughter’s heart channel. [End Page 101] She feels ranges of anger and refusal. Outside, wind grieves loudly.A dinner of radishes. Whiskey, soot. * Describe his voice—wild fig old spoon, sweating vines hawks again in a parking lot a red scab, possibly cancerous soft echo underground The father drowses. When he wakes, he asks the daughterfor a plate of blank spaces. Last week the daughter threw a plate of cooked beets across the kitchen.Red reasoned the backsplash,droplets to the carpet, the underside of cabinets. * A man from Georgia calls the daughter.He phones from a bed where he must continually stay in his old skin. The man keeps calling the daughter.The man talks and talks. He knew her father. Thinks he knows her father. The man explains the father as though the daughter does notunderstand the obligation of absence.As though father is a glow, not a last darkness, the man from Georgia quotes biblical passages.There is a bridge to each word the daughter doesn’t speak. [End Page 102] Best Song I study what is near: turkey mulch, straight line, brickpath. Nothing but meadows. So be it: a day stripped to unlatchinghours. Worn to slick heat. Everyone ate their cubed potatoes and left— toward the mountains, museums, their citiesand streetlights, violins in the existent rush forward. Being alone, unavoidablehow hard I want not to need my home, holed up as I amon this land. Low green afternoon. And stepping beyond the surveyed small town, the plate-sized camelliaswith their negligent scent and static trash at the curb. Bags crammedlike black flowers. Damp. Tight. Must settle to how to be spartan in these lonely rooms. You ask what I meanand it’s hard to say that so much of what I want is less—but more of itwhen there is none. The birds copy each other. They walk barefoot, heel-toe. Not tryingto escape. I hear the piffle released from their beaks and am nearly ashamed of how tenderit is to hear someone sing about where they live. [End Page 103] Lauren Camp Lauren Camp is the author of five books, most recently Took House (Tupelo Press). Honors include the Dorset Prize and finalist citations for the Arab American Book Award, the Housatonic Book Award, and the North American Book Award. Her poems have appeared in New England Review, Poet Lore, Kenyon Review, and Beloit Poetry Journal. Her work has been translated into Mandarin, Turkish, Spanish, Serbian, and Arabic. Copyright © 2021 University of Nebraska Press