Yesterday they put my eighty-eight-year-old
mother and me in exam room ten at the clinic,
the geriatric room, guessing by its full-color
poster that shows red pockets of inflamed
tissue around the joints and is titled Arthritis,
family scourge that has skipped her so far
rather than gripping her like my grandmother
or freezing her into her chair like my uncle.
Cherry juice, though, freed my cousin and
reportedly copper helped my friend Craig.
If afflicted I’ll eat ginger like a ninja and swill
apple cider vinegar as if it’s Spanish fly, or if
this disease gangs up with hypertension and
dementia on my mother I will bash it from
behind the door as it creeps into exam room
ten, which it patrols in order to reap recruits
once it shows them the ways they should suffer.

# # #

If Laurinda Lind got a dime for each poem publication, she would be up to $7.10 by now. Some acceptances and publications were in Abbey, Afterthoughts, Antithesis Journal, Ascent, Barbaric Yawp, Chiron Review, Cokefish, Cold Mountain Review, Communion, Comstock Review, Constellations, Ellipsis, Haight Ashbury Literary Journal, Indefinite Space, Indigo Lit, Liminality, Lucid Moon, Lucidity, Mobius, Moonsick, Mudfish, Origins, Passager, Paterson Literary Review, Plum Tree Tavern, Poetry Motel, Ship of Fools, Silver Birch Press, Touchstone, Trestle Creek Review, Triggerfish, Uproot, and Veil.

Photo credit: Terri Malone

Audio: Terri Muuss