Madelyn Camrud

I Run Off With a Daughter

Coming across The Keys, the whole world seamed, gray to gray.
Sky stitched to water, water to sky,

we float safe in no-man’s land.

Lose myself in mangroves, roots

like mutable bridges leading nowhere.

Stopped at tree farm, heading home,

seed pods looking like monkey faces,

long pods blood-red, hanging

from a fruit like loosed tongues.

Easy to see how everything relates—
DNA similar down to yeast cells

Yet, they tell me the pythons
like angry cousins kill,

;

crocodiles in the Everglades,
hard to know whose side to take

in this case. The glass-bottom boat
we rode hits bottom,

And we go home. I lose sleep in his shirts,
empty sleeves like poles rowing,

closet-hangar oars.

Merrell and Florsheim like fish swimming
underneath. In the dream,

last night, someone yelling:
Watch out for the boat!

Woke too late in the mirror to care.

Born and raised in North Dakota, Madelyn Camrud received a master’s degree in English from the University of North Dakota. Two full collections of poems, This House Is Filled with Cracks and Oddly Beautiful, were published by New Rivers Press, Moorhead, MN. Songs of Horses and Lovers, a long poem, will appear November 2013 by NDSU Regional Studies, Fargo, ND. Poem publications include Painted Bride Quarterly, Soundings East, Water-Stone Review, descant, California Quarterly, and New Millennium Writings among others. She attended retreats, workshops, UND’s annual Writer’s Conference for years and will attend the Bemidji, Minnesota Writer’s Conference June, 2017. Madelyn Camrud was named the Associate Poet Laureate of North Dakota in 2005.

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