As if it were a ghost-bat wrung from the rafters
of the house they handed
down to me, my grandparents gave
me the gene for this fear, a noose numbered
nineteen eighteen when he, a heron
of long legs and ratty lungs, stood in the street
flocking with healthy friends who were dead the next day,
and she, a hummingbird whose heart held only
so much machinery, nested at home
and watched out the window in her head while a wagon
ripe like the rot of the river drove by every day pulled
by panic and loaded with the bodies
of the no-longer-living. Yet somehow these two specimens
survived, and they look on with the pallid curiosity of
the permanently safe to see whether we will, too.
Laurinda Lind lives in New York’s North Country. Some publications/ acceptances are in Blue Earth Review, Midwest Quarterly, New American Writing, Paterson Literary Review, and Spillway; also 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).
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