Piles of Leo layer her house,
waist-high drifts of wasted years
uphill from the road where his wife
walked the white line, where

there’s only room for one;
debating whether to meet
the semis head to head, while
he held down a barstool built

for one wrecked human. At home,
thirty years of hundred-proof
husbandry built into berms
with tunnels through tiers

of catalogs, training pants,
Christmas wrap, coloring books.
The kids are out of the house now
and Leo, laid away, no longer waits

for logical conclusion, though she’s
still surviving the oncoming lane.
She hasn’t caught him head-on yet,
nor cleared him out of herself.

Laurinda Lind lives in New York’s North Country. Some poetry acceptances/ publications have been in Blueline, Comstock Review, Constellations, Main Street Rag, Paterson Literary Review, Radius, and Sinking City; also anthologies Visiting Bob [Dylan] (New Rivers Press) and AFTERMATH (Radix Media). In London in April, she won the 2018 Keats-Shelley Prize for adult poetry.