Praise Poem 
(for Leona)

Lauren Camp

Praise what the doctors told her 
in the small room. Praise email updates 
between siblings and how they set aside 
their otherwises, fat and buried. Praise 
last week and the tight clues before 
the masses and spreading. Praise the smoke- crusted turkey bones we shared.
Because this is nothing we wanted to know, praise, then, the stages, and the grimaces, and that we have chances to victor 
even a little over the landscape of body.  Praise our shames and the rages  we disappear into when the doctors 
give updates. Praise the way she first 
wrote it. Sorry, she typed of her dying.  Praise the selfless: those who drive 
her to hospital and ask all the questions,  and the pitiful us who just don’t. 
Because we aren’t done yet, praise the glands 
and enzymes of absorption, digestion,  for giving us bile that didn’t cause heaving.  Praise the heavens for allowing this 
to be a strange afternoon. Our little selves  needed something holy and damaged, 
a comfort, so hail came down, preaching 
and stubborn. Praise what will become 
of us who are already grieving. Praise that 
tomorrow is never today. We grabbed 
at each other as she discussed heirlooms,
and where his father would move to,
while we tried to stop thinking.  You probably already know there is  always a reason for rosaries and wrenchings, 
for ludicrous films. We praise Netflix’s 
queues over silence because whispers 
are worse, and we enter starched sleep  without resenting the night. No better 
praise than exhaustion. We don’t like  having our eyes open. On waking, 
we praise whatever we can: the moments 
there will be no birds, no music, 
everything canceled. This is the way,  and we praise every pulse, every minute 
we’ve carried even what we can’t render.

I Sat

I sat in the corner.  By the bed.

I sat in a steep bruise of weekend
with the particular secret of her dying.

And I sat in the dry weight of the next week. 
I wore my salmon shirt of pain.
I wore a wrinkled skirt.

I sat for as long as I could.

In her bedroom, Hospice nurses came.  Went. 
Everywhere the temptation 
to breathe. To open the door. 
How else to meet the future?

I sat in the corner by the oldest part of night.
I sat as morning volunteered its evidence.

I sat on the edge of her bed and touched her back.
I reversed the days and sat on the bed. 

On the bed, I discovered there were no days.
I traced my life on the comforter.
I sat, holding a palm of tiny pills
as she pitched to hallucination.

I sat with a book. I didn’t know what to say. 
I sat until the secret fell asleep, 
until the morphine drowned her.

I envy her everything she never revealed.
I didn’t ask for her thoughts. I sat and waited.

Lauren Camp is the author of five books, most recently Took House (Tupelo Press, 2020). Her poems have appeared in The Los Angeles Review, Pleiades, the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day series, Poet Lore, Slice, DIAGRAM and other journals. Winner of the Dorset Prize, she has also received fellowships from the Black Earth Institute and the Taft-Nicholson Center, and finalist citations for the Arab American Book Award, the Housatonic Book Award and the New Mexico-Arizona Book Award.