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Cento Between the Ending and the End

Cameron Awkward-Rich

Sometimes you don’t die

when you’re supposed to

& now I have a choice

repair a world or build

a new one inside my body

a white door opens

into a place queerly brimming

gold light so velvet-gold

it is like the world

hasn’t happened

when I call out

all my friends are there

everyone we love

is still alive gathered

at the lakeside

like constellations

my honeyed kin

honeyed light

beneath the sky

a garden blue stalks

white buds the moon’s

marble glow the fire

distant & flickering

the body whole bright-

winged brimming

with the hours

of the day beautiful

nameless planet. Oh

friends, my friends—

bloom how you must, wild

until we are free.

Cameron Awkward-Rich is the author of Sympathetic Little Monster (Ricochet Editions, 2016).

About Cameron Awkward-Rich

Themes

About this Poem

“‘Cento Between the Ending and the End’ is composed of language scavenged from the works of Justin Phillip Reed, Hieu Minh Nguyen, Fatimah Asghar, Kaveh Akbar, sam sax, Ari Banias, C. Bain, Oliver Bendorf, Hanif Abdurraqib, Safia Elhillo, Danez Smith, Ocean Vuong, Franny Choi, Lucille Clifton, and Nate Marshall. All of whom have made for me a world and for whom I wish the world.”
—Cameron Awkward-Rich

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More by this poet

Trans Study: Untitled 4 (Facial Expression)

Upon first glance, it is difficult to decipher a figure, much less a facial expression. Upon first glance, it is difficult, the figure. Upon first glance, there is no face. Upon first, undecipherable, the glance. It is difficult. It depends on who is looking. We might say: Upon first glance, we are in a dark room. We are behind our eyelids in the room. We are looking, in the dark. The figure before us is also behind the eyelids, their eyelids. It is as if neither we nor they are present to the other, though we are, looking, together, in and from the dark.

Cameron Awkward-Rich

2023

My Life Closed Twice

Liz, I think her name was, the woman
my mother brought me to. We played

cards in her perfumed office: lavender,
tulips, bowl of wax fruit. I was ten

and wanted to die. I don’t know why
I’m here again. I lived. Obviously,

Cameron Awkward-Rich

2023

Faggot Poetics

^{Yet I was, in peculiar truth, a very lucky boy.

—James Baldwin}

In any case, the story begins

with darkness. A classroom.

A broom closet. A bowl of bruised

light held over a city. Or, the story

Cameron Awkward-Rich

2018

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Cento Between the Ending and the End

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