Bearings

By Megan Snyder-Camp Megan Snyder-Camp

The marriage ran under their skin, a rash, or maybe

all that red wine, luminescent cocktail hours

in which lost books were rediscovered, or just a rash,

a reaction sending out runners across her chest,

a vine, something close, ruby scarves coming back

into fashion, their son coming back

from school, from the yard, but now, dinnertime

and the family parted, split houses, her ex and his anger

spread down the long hallway of their house

and into the windows of her new apartment, their daughter’s doubled

beds, her doubled face in family portraits that double

in frequency, a family set down and another, this dinnertime

and more red wine, our faces flush with love and sympathy,

the mother decides to see the son again, and so

our doubled flashlights giving us heaven and earth,

all of it safe or at least unmoving, the tall fence

her ex built to hide the little grave, to guard the lot

in this registered historic district (all of the houses

bear their stories on a plaque, their first stories,

run-on, this little town with no street lights, just moon,

cedars), the tall fence behind which is the yard, blue,

in this yard no marker stone and under this stone

their son’s everything, no double,

no double

Megan Snyder-Camp, “Bearings” from The Forest of Sure Things. Copyright © 2010 by Megan Snyder-Camp. Reprinted by permission of Tupelo Press.

Source: The Forest of Sure Things (Tupelo Press, 2010)

Biography

Megan Snyder-Camp's first collection of poetry, The Forest of Sure Things, was published by Tupelo Press in August 2010. Poems of hers have appeared in the Antioch Review, Field, the Sonora Review, ZYZZYVA, and elsewhere, and she is the recipient of a 2010 Individual Artist grant from Washington's 4Culture Foundation as well as residencies/scholarships at Djerassi, Bread Loaf, and the Espy Foundation. She lives in Seattle with . . .

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