El primer libro de Camille Rankine, Incorrect Merciful Impulses, será publicado por Copper Canyon Press. Es autora de la plaquette Slow Dance with Trip Wire que fue seleccionada por Cornelius Eady para recibir la beca de Poetry Society of America’s 2010 New York Chapbook Fellowship y recibió el premio “Discovery” otorgado por Boston Review (2010). Sus poemas han aparecido en Atlas Review, American Poet, The Baffler, Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, Octopus Magazine, Paper Darts, Phantom Limb, A Public Space, Tin House, entre otros. Camille es Assistant Director en el porgrama de Maestría en Escritura Creativa de Manhattanville College y directora editorial de Manhattanville Review. Camille vive en Nueva York.
THE PROBLEM OF DEATH WITHIN LIFE Given leave to speak, I shape my tongue into a shovel and ask for more. I should have told the truth, but the truth is incomplete. I seek the missing pieces and my eyes go lazy. It’s a choice I make that ruins me. I get off easy. I let myself go. I hide the faces of the dying, wrap what remains in lace and tuck it in the bottom drawer.
I’m sure I’ve pitied you all wrong. I don’t know how it’s done. I never learned. I engulf with an affection from a chasm a sweet trap door, a heart-shaped hole, a pretty well that threatens to swallow me up.
This is a brief malfunction. When you shift out of the frame, the feeling shorts and dissipates in sparks. What a mess I’ve made of this emotion. It’s only endlessness I’ve wanted. I can’t fill my bowl, or yours. I can’t keep my fool mouth shut. [first published in Octopus Magazine, Number 16, January 2014]
TAPFNY – The Americas Poetry Festival of New York