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 TOMáS Q. MORíN
I love how lightly this poem wears its connection to the Frank O’Hara poem of the same name. No epigraph, just one bold and brilliant heart speaking to another bold and brilliant heart across time about love and its emergencies.
And lest I forget, the close of the poem contains one of my favorite endings in all of poetry.
ABOUT TOMáS Q. MORíN
Tomás Q. Morín is the author of the forthcoming novel Cat Love from Pantheon, the poetry collections Machete, Patient Zero, and A Larger Country, and two memoirs. He is a Guggenheim Fellow and teaches at Rice University.
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SHARED WITH GRATITUDE
This poem appeared in Dispatch by Cameron Awkward-Rich, published by Persea, 2016. (Available on: Amazon • Bookshop)
DESCRIPTION
“Winner of the 2018 Lexi Rudnitsky Editor’s Choice Award, Cameron Awkward-Rich’s intimate second book of poems attempts to reckon with and withstand American violence.
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)
Read more poems by Cameron Awkward-Rich • Find books by this poet on Amazon • Bookshop • Follow on Instagram • Website • Or view my library
ENDNOTES
- This is Day 64 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: heartbreak • compassion • dreaming • Or browse the index
- If this work resonates with you, please consider supporting the archive. Thank you for reading.
breaks my heart, too
This is now the third time this poem has been posted on this site, lol. Not complaining, it’s hit me like a train each time I read it. I think that shows how deeply it resonates with people today.