Sleepchild


At first I forget almost everything
about her but in the early morning
in my sleep a thirteen-year-old girl
with a name I can’t remember fights 
up through the floor to me, even
now is burning a hole in the page, 

annoyed that I can’t really hear her 
since she won’t say it loud but she 
says she’s with child. Wants it away

and I’m not sure she should, though 
I don’t want anyone saying no to her, 
either. I want a secret society to have 
her for a year, just not judge her, 

watch her through it either way 
and after, send her off to school. She 
seems so smart. Or if an undersea 
city could absorb her so she can be 

as watery as she wants, except far 
from the rush of sharks. And meanwhile 
something born or unborn in her 

will need a name but at least by then 
she will find a day to walk out from my
dream. Not as some haunted woman who 
wants her own life, but first has to wait 
while I fish her back up from the dark.



Laurinda Lind lives in New York’s North Country, close to Canada. Some of her writing is in Blue Earth Review, New American Writing, Paterson Literary Review, and Spillway; also in anthologies What I Hear When Not Listening: Best of The Poetry Shack & Fiction, Vol. I (Sonic Boom), and Civilization in Crisis (FootHills Publishing). She is a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee.