Exoneration
Laurinda Lind
One skull ago he ran it singly to the city,
she as the mother without an end decade,
they in the city that overfathered,
a court that crowded them and candidates
standing in for the killer, the locked sidewalks
that worried her. The jury grabbed it up,
sat it out, said still all else he owned
would die. Sunday afternoon she’d be
coming and her purse of miracles was also
waiting, waiting, and sped inside her caring.
He wouldn’t steal the right medicine, didn’t have
another go, but he got off murder,
dragged strong by the left knee,
everything battered except this: hands
that kept one good call, pulled it off like
a rope, let it be years of raw thieving.
Did not ever take the trigger.
Laurinda Lind lives in New York’s North Country. Some publications/ acceptances are in Blue Earth Review, Gone Lawn, New American Writing, Spillway and Zombie Logic. Anthologies include Visiting Bob: Poems Inspired by the Life and Work of Bob Dylan (New Rivers Press) and AFTERMATH (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.
