Cameron Gearen | Sorry, Wept the Littered Riverbed

Sorry, Wept the Littered Riverbed. Poems by Cameron Gearen. Number 19 in our Rane Arroyo Series.

Publication:  June 30, 2023 [100 copies]
29 pages
ISBN 978-1-960693-02-0
$ 12.00

[ cover design: Eric Savlin ]

Cameron Gearen‘s full-length poetry collection, Some Perfect Year, came out from Shearsman Press in 2016. Her essays and poems have appeared in The Washington Post, Hippocampus, Dame Magazine, Pithead Chapel, Autofocus, The Antioch Review, Northwest  Review, Green Mountains Review, Fence, River Styx,and many other journals. She has benefited from a Barbara Deming Money for Women grant. Former US Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky selected her chapbook, Night, Relative to Day, for publication in the Aldrich Poetry Competition. She was the Hemingway Writer-in-Residence from 2017-2019. She lives in River Forest, Illinois.

Insomnia Ex-Voto in a City with 21 Million

I didn’t want to be awake to learn
of the forty-five minutes near three a.m.
when cars don’t swirl around this corner.
I am, though, awake to hear the misted black
lit up still with the lights of 21 million,
the whole city—its fog and noise,
its superior mole sauce, its dueling
Seven-Elevens—tramping across my small deck,
banging on the glass doors, and kneeling
where I lie. I study my sleeping lover, early
in our days. Sometimes I fear I’ll call him
the wrong name: ex-husband merely
a habit now, long memory, but elbowing
his way in sometimes. Today, mosquitoes
raged our limbs. At Frida’s, we
stopped at her bed—short, mirrored—
noted the little jar, her ashes. We
beheld her braces and corsets, her
wild dresses designed to distract
from the broken. We split a large
hot chocolate on the corner and then,
thinking of Frida and Trotsky (was it true?),
we took each other’s hands and set them
in the right places, we prayed for
sleep and I found only rest, thinking
of the seven-piece mariachi band
on the sidewalk and the five-peso
pieces he handed them as they left.