Laurinda Lind
Laurinda Lind lives in New York’s North Country, near Canada. Some of her writing is in in Atlanta Review, New American Writing, Paterson Literary Review, and Spillway. She is a Keats-Shelley Prize winner, and a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee.
Away with Each Other
My mother and I drink hot water
all day because we’re traveling,
we haven’t yet bought tea.
She asks over and over where
are we, so I write it out: away
in Vermont for two weeks.
It’s close to five on our second day,
she’s still in a nightgown since
she never changes or showers
or combs her hair until I talk her
into it. She doesn’t ask who I am
since I seem so familiar. Still,
sometimes she wants to know who
my mother is. I get her to guess
until she runs out of sisters and cousins,
then eventually she asks if maybe
it’s she. Usually a thing she’s pleased
to realize. In our room, I try to read
despite a headache from the people
upstairs pounding out crappy country,
so I turn the TV to a game show
with the volume at one hundred,
which gets them to go even
louder, but before long the speakers
are absolutely shrieking and soon
I know I’ve won when they go silent.
I relent, but I keep the V button
close. Meanwhile my mother
is drawing again and it’s the same face
she’s sketched for seven years,
a woman with old-style hair and
retro movie makeup. She can’t
name her, either, this one who comes
to see whether we will recognize
ourselves in her, or at least decide
what we are to one another. Or
which of us is most responsible
that the other is even here.
Opening Episode
The room, lit like a raid. Those who gang up to get the baby are in green, and suspended from the ceiling hangs a mirror curved complex like a bubble, mounted as if it is an eyeball of simple surveillance. As if they’ll broadcast a birth by satellite overseas so people can say, See, in America, they too, make a mess of it. Soon something gives. Look look look, a guy in green says and I’m like I can’t watch it and do it at the same time and after about a trillion puffs of trilene gas, they don’t even give that anymore but it is so good, there is Erin out in the air: she and I exchange a startled glance over what we have gotten ourselves into this time. Then they take her off and teach her to cry. They also repair what they ripped while they roll the credits, as they tell the audience to tune in next week for a new season of Unskilled Mother.