Meditations in an Emergency by Cameron Awkward-Rich
Meditations in an Emergency
Cameron Awkward-RichI wake up & it breaks my heart. I draw the blinds & the thrill of rain breaks my heart. I go outside. I ride the train, walk among the buildings, men in Monday suits. The flight of doves, the city of tents beneath the underpass, the huddled mass, old women hawking roses, & children all of them, break my heart. There’s a dream I have in which I love the world. I run from end to end like fingers through her hair. There are no borders, only wind. Like you, I was born. Like you, I was raised in the institution of dreaming. Hand on my heart. Hand on my stupid heart.
SELECTED BY HALA ALYAN
I’ve returned to Cameron Awkward-Rich’s gorgeous poem “Meditations in an Emergency” countless times over the years, often in moments of crisis (which are also usually moments of deep grief and alertness). It has come to feel like a voice note from a friend, somehow both from the future and the past, the voice of something surviving or believing in their capacity to do so.
The poem does more than provide a compass or blueprint for the “emergency” (and what isn’t an emergency right now? Genocide, cruel legislation, our ordinary heartbreaks.). It makes legible the only balm to devastation: a reminder that you’re not alone in it.
ABOUT HALA ALYAN
Hala Alyan is the author of the novels Salt Houses—winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Arab American Book Award, and a finalist for the Chautauqua Prize—and The Arsonists’ City, a finalist for the Aspen Words Literary Prize. She is also the author of five highly acclaimed collections of poetry, including The Twenty-Ninth Year and The Moon That Turns You Back. Her debut memoir, I’ll Tell You When I’m Home, was recently published by Simon & Schuster. She lives in Brooklyn with her family, where she works as a clinical psychologist and professor at New York University.
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SHARED WITH GRATITUDE
This poem appeared in Dispatch by Cameron Awkward-Rich, published by Persea Books, 2019. (Available on: Amazon • Bookshop)
DESCRIPTION
“Set against the media environment that saturates even our most intimate spaces, Dispatch attends to, revises, and thinks adjacent to the news of racial/gendered violence in the US, from the nineteenth century to the present day. These poems ask: What kind of revisions will make this a world/a story that is concerned with my people’s flourishing? How ought I pay attention, how to register perpetual bad news without letting it fatally intrude? Cameron Awkward-Rich is among the most bracing voices to emerge in recent years, a dazzling exemplar of poetry’s (and humanity’s) possibilities.” (Source)
ABOUT CAMERON AWKWARD-RICH
Poet and writer Cameron Awkward-Rich is the author of the full-length poetry collections An Optimism (Persea Books, 2025), Dispatch (Persea Books, 2019), and Sympathetic Little Monster (Ricochet Editions, 2016), as well as the chapbook Transit (Button Poetry, 2015). Awkward-Rich is also the author of The Terrible We: Thinking with Trans Maladjustment (Duke University Press, 2022). A Cave Canem fellow, he earned a PhD from Stanford University. He teaches women, gender, and sexuality studies… (more)
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ENDNOTES
- This is Day 21 of Poems We Carry, celebrating the 20th anniversary of Read A Little Poetry—a living archive I’ve nurtured for two decades. For this milestone series, I invited writers I deeply admire to share poems that have meant something to them over time.
- Explore other works in pursuit of: world • heartache • self • Or browse the index
- If this work resonates with you, please consider supporting the archive. Thank you for reading.
