Laurinda Lind
There was worse work in Delphi than this
in the past thousand years, soldiering sucks
for example, streetwalking’s exhausting
oh the stink. Am I a cultist you ask, yes
I am, gossip about your ghosts seeping
out of the stones gets you picked for Apollo,
then you won’t waste yourself, a wifeslave.
You call me a celibate well how cute is
that, you just keep thinking so, once a month
I sit where two earth faults intersect and
through a crack in my soul I let ethylene
gas and oleander find my trigger. Have
you ever heard the leaves when they
speak, even if they stay silent a pan full
of water would want to weep words.
And no we don’t die young, we go when
the god says look here’s your door, he
won’t have to ask twice. All of a life is
spent learning to die, I do it better than
anyone so how about you hurry up and
burn your goat, rattle your coins all
the way up the stairs to me. You are
a load of laurel, I am ripe on the rock,
you had better get ready to listen.
Laurinda Lind lives in New York’s North Country, close to Canada. Some of her writing is in Atlanta Review, Blue Earth Review, New American Writing, Paterson Literary Review, and Spillway. She is a Keats-Shelley Prize winner and a finalist in several other competitions, most recently the Joy Bale Boon Prize and the Jack Grapes Poetry Prize.