Poetryzine Magazine presents the selected poems by the American poetess Laurinda Lind
Did You Think it Was
Safe to Go Outside Again
The anger the animal you don’t
disturb from its den since
it will eat your arm at a moment’s
notice or your whole head or anyone
else, no other thought than this,
time to tear things apart.
I keep my distance like a raptor
isolated in a zoo behind glass.
But once, I flung the phone
so hard to the floor
its words fell out of it
and never again fit back in.
I slammed the door at the Trailways
bus station on a night in Plattsburgh
when they wouldn’t give me
my suitcase and I really
wanted the door to break.
I can’t be this beast out
of some subterranean tunnel, or
its body of scorching acid.
It should surrender
its collection of scalps, but
it still wants to live. It’s a shard,
a shared flaw that pins
us here to the planet.
Courtship Sooner or later in your small town you will stand across concrete from the man you know is the next one while he is pumping fuel and you will do a brave thing because he himself hasn’t seen this yet: you will pull your car round to his other side, and run down your window to talk. He will say how discouraged he is since he never shot a deer all season, despite trying hard every day. And shy as you are, though you hear in your head how he could light the darkness in you or at least start a new day to hum beside your old one, you will hold your hand over your collarbone and collect yourself against his talk of the hunt, you love animals so much. And once he sees you more clearly, this is the first thing he will come to terms with before he comes to you.
First Off
It’s good to get the first
breakdown out of the way fast
so it can be the baseline for all
that follow. Twenty as a sad space
but the right place to unravel, not
rare as in infrequent considering
crap that comes first, then in its
context is covered over season by
season while you feel partly hollow,
a flooded hall. Later you could
get worse, yet you will never be
as lost again as you are when
you think you know where
you live, but haven’t yet found
a home in any house.
*Laurinda Lind lives in the U.S. in New York State, close to the St. Lawrence River. Some of her writing is in A-Minor, Amsterdam Quarterly, BlueHouse Journal, Keats-Shelley Review, Maintenant, The Ogham Stone, Sonic Boom, Spillway, subTerrain, and Two Thirds North. She is a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee.
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