by Lauren Camp
I got the pinking shears out and sliced up today’s newspaper.
Little airborne triangles of newsprint fluttered to the floor.
Libya became Lib,
Lib became Bill, and I remembered my friend,
how when we were kids in 1973,
we belted out the Oreo song
(back then all TV commercials qualified as songs
in my limited musical library).
But I won’t sing it for you now.
There’s nothing to sing about.
The news is thick enough that three pages hurt my palm.
The scissor blade was dulling.
The flickers all tell knock-knock jokes this time of year,
and another part of the house sinks into a hole.
I pull you outside to see the damage.
We stand in the platter of mulch I tossed down
to cover Elizabeth’s double-headed black hollyhock seeds.
Look down, I say. You’re stepping on them.
They’ll never grow now.
Lauren Camp has published a book of poems, This Business of Wisdom (West End Press, 2010). She is an accomplished visual artist and a radio host for Santa Fe Public Radio. A recent guest editor for World Literature Today, her poems have also appeared in Leveler, dirtcakes, Upstairs at Duroc, and other journals. She lives, works and blogs in a rural farming village near Santa Fe, New Mexico.
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