three poems

CAMILLE CARTER

“NIGHT OUT”

The silence                   :                       she wore

as fur.

The gesture                   :                       deliberate

 & half-made.

The dress                      :                        stitched

to kill.

The evening bag            :                       filled with

 thorns.

 “WE SURRENDER TO THE COLONIZER”

You can take the moon.          

                                    Now that you’ve bought it,

                                    now that you’ve earned it.

You can take the moon.

                                    If you want it,

                                    you can have it.

You can take the moon.

                                    Put stock in your survival—

                                                            in that place, we’d put it too. 

You                  can                  take                 the                   moon,

you can take it. Take

all the things we never owned,

always knowing how we’d give…

“MORE THAN AESTHETIC DIFFERENCES”

I labor to find

a sacramental salvo     in the blessing

of a life sentence,        in the gesamtkunstwerk

of a face.  Behind the lens, bones belie

a lexicon.        Fatalism’s not romantic.

Understand:

You have not understood.

Camille Carter is a writer, poet, educator, and traveler. Her recent work appears in Poetry, The Greensboro Review, Meridian, Passages North, and elsewhere. She lives and teaches in New York, where she is currently pursuing her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature.