Double Red Window
Photography, 7" x 10"
Roger Camp is the author of three photography books including the award winningButterflies in Flight,Thames & Hudson, 2002. His documentary photography has been awarded the Europe’s prestigious Leica Medal of Excellence and published in numerous journals includingThe New England Review, New York Quarterly,andNorth American Review.
2026 Triaged
Grace Lynn
Even in a room filled with pain, we’re skeptical when the nurse calls the well-dressed man first, or the teen with a black eye & cocaine on her dress. We’re sick of hate speech, of judging each other read about Taylor Swift & weight loss, put out by the runner who keeps asking us to feel the bone poking out of her foot, & the paranoid benzodiazepine addict who picked at every pimple on his scarred face, & counts coins & pomegranate seeds, then buries them in the yard. Out the window, a nurse yells at a janitor selling weed, & a policeman brags about how Viagra transforms his balls. Somebody turns up the volume on her headphones. Suddenly Instagram crams the space with cat memes, coffee enema benefits, anti-aging ads & Kim Kardashian’s butt sculpting recommendations. But we can’t quit thinking about snake bites, the latest flu & flesh wounds, the tendons on the surgeon’s latex hands, dialysis machines, brains in jars, medical record numbers & color-coded diagrams of the body. When the suicidal lady dressed in skimpy underwear & a bra who tried to cut her wrist off is pushed in, all four limbs chained to a gurney, praying for us to kill her, we nearly forget our own afflictions. The attendants can’t find the right sedative to halt her thrashing. Fuck God, her voice rattles between Netflix & YouTube scenes. & we power off our screens until the inflected quiet stitches our bodies with isolation, a darkness never redeemed by constellations or an owl’s eyes, as emergencies blur her blood with the color of new need.
