Voices
Bette Jane Camp
On her grandma’s swing
beams
Little You, toes
tickling the arbor vitae
back
as she finds up,
up,
a little more—
the cows appear
sacred
like ice cream,
orange
and vanilla, the sunflowers
leer
across stolen
acres, and their seeds
crunch
in her mind’s mouth, salivating
for
the old language, to roll
up
the earth’s vowels, as they strike
her heels
with the command
of
her hidden
ancestors,
to come back,
back
to safe as
corn on the cob—
back
to the body
she’ll keep trying
out of.
Bette Jane Camp is a poet from Mukilteo, WA. Her work appears at Indolent Books: What Rough Beast Series, FORTH Magazine, and Northwest Parkinson's Foundation, among others. She's currently Associate Editor of Poetry at Mud Season Review.