Blind Spot Lauren Camp (bio) Keywords poetry, Lauren Camp, dissector, optomology, retina, perception, eyes Right when the dissector picks up the eye, I notice the sunhas already found a place to bruise with light. With slight pressure, she shifts the pink flesh and muscle.That eye can’t see to ask its paths. Or fact its ransom. I slept in heat, unrolled, and woke in a murky tide. What I meantby coming here was to lose everything but rescue. When she cuts through the eye, thickness packs her palm. I forgive myselfthe looking, when I never would before. Her hands are soft, comfortable, close in. I am trying to understand my life.She punctures it, the eye. And all along gives names for what is inside out. I watch again the surfacebeing slit through. Shadows replenish in the chasm. The solid cap, liquid gasps of exhalation, the bloodied wrapper.In the desert, how fine I’ve found the distance and disconnected strata. The eye is my sky. But I am suspendednow in the contrast: green lawns, spun waterfalls and poised portraits on inner walls. My swath of attention.The iris is loose in her fingers and she tugs it to a ring; her cuticle beds are pink, blushing,supple, stretching the jelly, what is weeping and clear, down to the lens which squishesthe retina. In this unlikely place in the urges [End Page 134] of spring, moss blossoms on rock. A light stirof ripples on the pool after a woman circled her drone above it. A hum sprawls the ground. And later, the moongoosing the porch chairs. Cutting my view just to this. [End Page 135] Lauren Camp lauren camp is the Poet Laureate of New Mexico and 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, Housatonic Book Award and New Mexico–Arizona Book Award. Her poems have appeared in Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, The Common, and Beloit Poetry Journal, and her work has been translated into Mandarin, Turkish, Spanish, Serbian, and Arabic. Copyright © 2023 The Massachusetts Review, Inc