Poetry By Laurinda Lind

Laurinda Lind is a poet living in northern New York. This year she won first place in the North Country Writers (NY) poetry contest, and second place in the New York State Fair poetry competition. Her work appears, or will appear in Bombay Gin, CALAMITY, Comstock Review, The Cortland Review, Gone Lawn, Gyroscope, Jet Fuel Review, Josephine Quarterly, SWIMM, Triggerfish, Unbroken, Uproot, and Welter.

Their Going

We can’t bear bad

luck if it leaps past

stiles and inhabits

the undersides of

livestock, except

when less-strong

stars shift overhead

for them first or tiny

clocks seek to collect

their sleep. We keep

our wrists in our

sleeves in case

they escape

up the century.

That’s the place

where we can

really ride them.                                                    

An Alchemy

A vessel that

can’t contain itself

will not wait for

the rest of

the reckoning

will only

learn to turn

and tilt till

it finds

a run where

it spills its old cold

wine out under

the direct rays

since in its ruin it

still remembers.                                

Flight Instructions

It’s not that we fought the first declension, when every good goddamn came with its own climax/  anticlimax. This time what taps in the eggshell is older than that, has already fractured at least one alphabet. Its current can’t countenance traction. But a warm radio might wait its the epicenter, might soar with no wings. Still, what’s wise won’t rise until stained dry. While tongues are only diagnostic if they don’t read radioactive. While the height of an escalation stays half-hidden. The best advice is 1) to hatch fast and run hard, 2) to trend as high as the treeline, and 3) to save whatever surprises you since it hangs to the edge of the edge.