Saving Sylvia

First, assume the au pair there
on time. Then, peel back past
your problems to their base:

naming them enables joy. Next,
armed with yourself, stubbornly
stay and stay, go incandescent

with your staying, don’t be lady
anybody. Ladies lay their heads
down in ovens. Seize Lazarus

out of his biblehole and set him
begging bootless with daddy,
barefoot in the seasons. Shove

the guilty lovers down the stairs.
The fiery eye, that’s yours to keep,
you’ve got to track the threat.

But recognize, as in constellations,
that you are not the only one:
just the only one of you.

Laurinda Lind lives in New York’s North Country. Some publications/ acceptances are in Blue Earth Review, Midwest Quarterly, New American Writing, Paterson Literary Review, and Spillway; also the anthologies Visiting Bob: Poems Inspired by the Life and Work of Bob Dylan (New Rivers Press) and AFTERMATH: Explorations of Loss and Grief (Radix Media). In 2018, she won first place in both the Keats-Shelley Prize for adult poetry and the New York State Fair poetry competition.