by Laurinda Lind

It is a Covid year and in our town
no one has died of Covid, this is a function
of greographic access more than
mutual consideration since no one here wants
to believe that what has come to us has come
to us, after all who says it is a Covid year,
only immunologists and don’t they eat the babies
of immigrant children in tunnels under the White
House, watch them like a hawk, for example,
no one has died of Covid unless you count
Lavina four miles away, six feet tall and ready
to crush anyone in a hug, certainly everyone else
was saved in her expanded doublewide church
that wouldn’t suspend services before there was
a vaccine, they were the good guys saving us all
from the bad people eating babies in tunnels
under the capital, is it really a Covid year or
won’t Satan come for anyone who says so,
I miss Lavina, maybe she was raptured ahead
of the rest, people die every year so who
can say it was Covid, those spikes under
the microscope could have been drawn in
by hand like an approaching hurricane. We
were different before this. We were better,
in love with a way we could have been.
Everyone has died of Covid.

Laurinda Lind

Laurinda Lind lives in New York’s North Country, close to Canada. Some of her writing is in 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. She is a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee.

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