My mother was a house
     I couldn’t quit soon enough,
a place with peepholes

I poured out through and
     doors that opened in every
dark so in my sleep, bags

of ballast slipped from
     around me and I spun
uncentered from cellar to attic.

I couldn’t see she was soldered
     to me under my skin, this mess
of her then me, mortgage I

can’t pay no matter how raw
     I run. How wrong I rattled
around in her rooms.

Laurinda Lind lives in the U.S. in New York State’s North Country, and won the 2018 Keats-Shelley prize. Her poetry has appeared in Antiphon, Antithesis Journal, Crannóg, Sonic Boom, and Two Thirds North among others; also in anthologies Visiting Bob: Poems Inspired by the Life and Work of Bob Dylan (New Rivers Press) and AFTERMATH (Radix Media).