Why it Matters how Bullfrogs Swallow
When I don’t know what to do with so much
daylight and fistfuls of the newest
what if alone, I cross
the street straight into a range of flinty headlights.
On the hatchery map I learn how to find
the yellow eggs and the siphon.
The aimless sky is the color of walls.
Eight hundred brook trout uplift
in the quivering tank. Multiple
times they flop and swirl. When they fold
to an underside, it helps me relax.
I am writing the beginning
of a transparent book with circular points.
How long my life and fast it has gone.
Now in a room I join
the frogs and lizards. Snakes
hide away in embossed circumstance.
There are many times the heart is incomplete.
I look into a lake trout’s mouth. Transparent pink.
Its eye gouges in to a black center.
My mind switches back-and-forth yellow gold bluish green.
I’m here and here is a temporary
space to either side of war.
While people are hunting gnawed proof
finally, I wander out.
A man sweeps leaves into a pile.
Wind comes up and practices its haste.
The leaves swivel, then overlap to a softness.
daylight and fistfuls of the newest
what if alone, I cross
the street straight into a range of flinty headlights.
On the hatchery map I learn how to find
the yellow eggs and the siphon.
The aimless sky is the color of walls.
Eight hundred brook trout uplift
in the quivering tank. Multiple
times they flop and swirl. When they fold
to an underside, it helps me relax.
I am writing the beginning
of a transparent book with circular points.
How long my life and fast it has gone.
Now in a room I join
the frogs and lizards. Snakes
hide away in embossed circumstance.
There are many times the heart is incomplete.
I look into a lake trout’s mouth. Transparent pink.
Its eye gouges in to a black center.
My mind switches back-and-forth yellow gold bluish green.
I’m here and here is a temporary
space to either side of war.
While people are hunting gnawed proof
finally, I wander out.
A man sweeps leaves into a pile.
Wind comes up and practices its haste.
The leaves swivel, then overlap to a softness.
Spring 2026
Photo by Bob Godwin
New Mexico Poet Laureate Emerita Lauren Camp (2022-25) is the author of eight books of poetry, including One Hundred Hungers (Tupelo Press, 2016), finalist for the Arab American Book Award and winner of the Dorset Prize, and In Old Sky (Grand Canyon Conservancy, 2024), which grew out of her experience as Astronomer-in-Residence at Grand Canyon National Park. Her next collection will be Is Is Enough (Texas Review Press, 2026). Camp’s poems have been translated into Mandarin, Turkish, Spanish, French, and Arabic.
Art: Pamela Hobart Carter
While We Listen, 2025
An any-side-up, ink, pastel, and acrylic on (cheap) paper
While We Listen, 2025
An any-side-up, ink, pastel, and acrylic on (cheap) paper