poem /cameron gearen

Insomnia On Day Four Of Our Fight

I haven’t named the holy thwarted but the way you grimaced past midnight

when I failed to stop my tongue, its raging prattle: I know. I have always said

too many things to one soul and this dusk on a cornfield’s membrane doesn’t disappoint.

Walk the dog to the river and she chooses the sheep each time. She skirts the spot

the wild turkeys gamble. I see how in this creek people have left sinks

full of bottles; they have left two ladders, bouquet of dolls. They’ve

strung chili lights that haven’t shone since the nineties. Tonight I said

don’t you see and I can’t, said that is not the way, said

it grating. Late, I creep toward the shrouded, inky bathroom, rinse

my cheeks. The door sloughs as the dog and I repair to the dark

patio where the hammock scrapes the pavers. I hate how people call stars

patchwork. They are spilled there in the firmament like someone’s

errant glue. Obvious, hateful. You sleep on. I apologize to your dream

(sorry, wept the littered riverbed) while the dog takes off for the barn.

---

Cameron Gearen‘s full-length poetry collection, Some Perfect Year, came out from Shearsman Press in 2016. Her essays and poems have appeared in The Washington Post, Hippocampus, Dame Magazine, Pithead Chapel, Autofocus, The Antioch Review, Northwest Review, Green Mountains Review, Fence, River Styx, and many other journals. She has benefited from a Barbara Deming Money for Women grant. Former US Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky selected her chapbook for publication. She was the Hemingway Writer-in-Residence from 2017-2019. She lives in River Forest, Illinois.