The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Is Is Enough by Lauren Camp

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ON HARMONY

Train stops and eggplant and the grim little sun and our clapping
all morning and later we slicked down to righteous
dance moves, pink greasy boxes of dough. Some would say

we were not divine between us but we hummed our shared holy
family in a quarry of folding chairs. One hour skimmed
to another and they were not forbidden, or clarified

with reason, but the ache of the olives and responses
rendered in timbal, qanun, tarub, the oud, and the sounds again
of distress and truth. Darwish said “Nothing is harder…than the smell

of dreams while they’re evaporating.” On those days we dressed
in our blacks and thick tongues, and the narrative
we offered was not an acceptance, a raging. We wanted to forget

to kneel. We spent the days linked to our divisions
of oppression and we fixed to the matter
of beginning. Every thought claimed five wounds. Dresses loose

with their fine threads, red and lime,
wheat gold. Outside, a stone bridge watched the great river
weeping; a mother sang to her baby. My taste in the mouth

of this crowd. Habibi, our losses, and the most of us rustling
our arrows beneath them. Five times a day we ate the oily
sweetness with our vigorous fingers, our tongues moving to cumin

and cream, and we passed from news to a chapel
of pita, to portions of dusk, our ghosts and marginal angers.
I took 48 photos of shadows in quick succession,



thinking one better than another, and saw in each photo
a lapse to spot evidence. I deleted them
from my memory which wanted not to hunger

for these compulsions, statistics. We were taught
so many instances to doubt, but the light came along
singing and we joined it, taking its melody as a apology.

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