Into the Gap
Everything on shore bites,
but I’m not there. My friend
Fred is back at the throttle
and I’m up in the bow on
a boat cushion since they
haven’t yet passed the life-
preserver law. Under our feet
soft waves slap the aluminum
hull and behind Fred, the Evinrude
waves a flag of exhaust back
to my mother on the beach who
in her mind has murdered me
for what I’ve done now. We aim
through the gap between Tin
and Raspberry toward what
looks like the other side but
is only another island, big as
a glacier’s underbelly. Behind,
there is only blame and the land
carved out and of course once
I grow up I’ll grind into it like
maimed granite, but for now I fill
my face as full of wind as I can
since as long as we are loose on the lake,
Fred and I have ourselves forever.
Kamikaze
He is old and he will not eat. He is listening
to someone inside shouting louder than I
can hold him. Planes have streaked down
the sky on him for seventy years, so how
could this honey and yogurt stop up any
hole like that? Toward the end of the war
he fought in the Forties, they were kids
autographing the air with their fear while
my father swam out to them in metal, and
from the swarm of them, only one came back
to earth. But pain is everywhere possible,
he learned, and now when we are so tired
together and his ears and his years and feet
don’t fit and he is so old that I am old also
and, as I said, he will not eat, those kids
have come up from the bottom dripping wet,
though they aim this time at the mainland.
And he can’t walk and can’t see, either, but
still they’ve waited for him. And sometime
soon, no matter how hard I try to hold him
back, he will want to fly away with them.
A Note I Found from Something I Don’t Remember that Happened Fifteen Years Ago
We had just put the lower window
back in its frame next to our bed,
the summer so suffocating that we’d
never missed it, not even the night
of the tornado when our dark shingles
shot off, bats streaking down the street.
We shut ourselves in and the wood
groaned home. The edges met. But
then the next night with no wind,
a recurrent mighty thrum pounded
at the pane. What’s that, you said
as you came upstairs. I don’t know,
I said, there’s a torpedo trapped
in there. I think you laughed. I hope
we thought we were funny. From
this note I’ve found, it sounds like it
never unsettled our five-year-old son
asleep across the hall. Now, of course,
I know what tried to come, this claw
that always rakes around, raw as
black mold seeping under the green
sill. It was our two hearts fighting
for air. The way they would knock in
the night, twelve years later when
we found him ruined in his room.
Laurinda Lind has had poems accepted by Another Chicago Magazine, Blue Earth Review, Blueline, Comstock Review, Constellations, Main Street Rag, Off the Coast, and Paterson Literary Review. Her work also appears in the anthologies Visiting Bob: Poems Inspired by the Life and Work of Bob Dylan (New Rivers Press), and AFTERMATH: Explorations of Loss and Grief (Radix Media). In 2018 she won first places in the Keats-Shelley Prize for adult poetry and the New York State Fair poetry competition.