Camp
by Joshua McKinney
Perhaps in some distant boyhood you lay on your back in the backyard grass and gazed up at the heavens. Perhaps, on those hot summer nights, you fought sleep, afraid that even a blink might conceal some celestial body arcing out of darkness into nothing. Was there a sibling or friend beside you, one who would share what you’d seen and could verify the fall? Without that other, could you be sure? And was it that same darkness in some other country, rockets arcing overhead, the white lights of tracers portioning out the night like hot wires, the constant cries of the others which in time would become the cries of those you knew, perhaps a wife, perhaps a son or daughter, a mother, father, or friend come stumbling faceless out of an opioid haze to stay your hand reaching for a time clock, to guide your hand reaching for a gun? And is it the noise of voices, those voiceless voices, voices only sleep can stop, and sleep never comes long enough or deep enough, and so do you find yourself walking to get warm because tonight it will be near freezing beneath the overpass and if you are to survive you must take that warmth with you into your sleeping bag, draw the rank cloth and cardboard over your head like a lid and burrow deep into that distant earliest darkness where you can close your eyes against the cold mechanics of the stars?
Joshua McKinney’s fifth book of poetry, Sad Animal (Gunpowder Press 2024), won the John Ridland Poetry Prize. His work has appeared in such journals as Boulevard, Denver Quarterly, Kenyon Review, New American Writing, and many others. His other awards include The Dorothy Brunsman Poetry Prize, The Dickinson Prize, The Pavement Saw Chapbook Prize, and a Gertrude Stein Award for Innovative Writing. He is co-editor of the online ecopoetics zine, Clade Song.