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  • Leaving for Camp
  • Andrea L. Watson (bio)

We turn the corner off 123rd and Union Turnpike, enter a dry goods store:

Rows of sagging shelves, cubbyholes, wide-plank floors, and glass-topped cases growing acres of cloth.

A man comes out from the back, his real-life. Smiles. He knows us, knows our names.

He takes my mother’s hand, holds mine ten seconds too long, spreads out girls’ socks in a fanned deck. [End Page 42] One turn of the dealer’s hand and on the soft pulse of his left wrist five numbers, blue, aged-iron train tracks or darkening beads, bloodprints of a dove heart-pierced in a bramble forest.

We offer up our season’s list.

He pulls out pieces of camp uniforms— shorts for the dressing room, caps, underpants, size 4, name tags in silver, a worsted slate blanket for the cold.

My eyes stay with the numbers 84731. I cannot count that high.

My mother follows my gaze, now deep as dusk, holds my wondering in her hands like untwining parcel string. He packages

up the warmth of my summer, and I look long into his back room. Old photographs whisper on peeling walls. A woman dreaming in an orchid garden. A young boy dancing in leaves.

Shadow world of that other life before winter. [End Page 43]

Andrea L. Watson

Former Director of Admissions for The Denver Campus for Jewish Education, Andrea L. Watson’s poetry has appeared in RUNES, Comstock Review, Ekphrasis, Folio, Dublin Quarterly, and Earth’s Daughters, among others. Her show, Braided Lives: A Collaboration Between Artists and Poets, was inaugurated by the Taos Institute of Arts and has traveled to San Francisco, Denver, and Berkeley. She is co-editor of HeartLodge: Honoring the House of the Poet.

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