Laurinda Lind
Three Poems
While We Stay Home Scared, the Air Improves
The virus its morphology under the microscope,
its sphere of little trees like a forested planet
that won’t tolerate loggers like us. Once
you see what the host cell has to do, you may
misread “transcriptase” as “striptease.”
And “spillover event,” like from cows
to humans in 1890, as “overall evening,”
meaning both end of day and social leveling:
our planet, too, really loves its trees.
Is Anything Not a Weapon Now
Whose hands lobbed an orange
across the apocalypse
to this store where
it waits with its secrets
for me to buy it but
not touch my face
look with eyes of love at every
other shopper wonder
which of us are bombs
To My Husband & His Hair & its Prettiness in the Light
Your hair looks nice today
I tell my mother who at 91
has a better head of it than I do
but next I think of you since
she says handsome at you
whenever she sees you despite
what she told us years ago, you
would never be welcome in
her house while now here
she lives in your house,
is not dying in a COVID-19
deathtrap warren with
a roommate even more undone
than she is, instead she has us,
the guilty lovers so morally
degenerate & devoid of
human decency still holding
each other up, it feels like
so many lifetimes later.
—Submitted on 06/06/2020
Laurinda Lind’s poems have appeared in Green Briar Review, Fourth & Sycamore, The Cortland Review, Fire Poetry Review, The Galway Review, and other journals, as well as in the anthologies Visiting Bob: Poems Inspired by the Life and Work of Bob Dylan (New Rivers Press, 2018) and Aftermath: Explorations of Loss and Grief (Radix Media, 2018). She lives in Jefferson County, New York, near the Canadian border.
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