Board Game

By Laurinda Lind

I break like the board
won’t, though it will hold
me in the air weighing
what I weigh at six,
seesaw with a best friend
heavy like a forcefield
sitting her ground at her end,
her teeth small in the sun.
For her, I am so much fun afraid
to fall, can’t get my eyes
not to cry when every school day
she says her secret sentence,
I don’t really like you.
It will be nine years before
I know to say fuck you.
For now I can’t forget
to be frantic, and I don’t
believe an adult could fix
this. Too scared to think
of sending a river of urine
down the steep slope at her,
I don’t have siblings to trade
terrors with. I will climb
down in time, but by then
my legs will be miles
long. My mouth will
be old, a machete.

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Laurinda Lind lives in New York’s North Country. Some publications are at Atlanta Review, New American Writing, Paterson Literary Review, and Spillway; also, anthologies What I Hear When Not Listening: Best of The Poetry Shack & Fiction (Sonic Boom) and Civilization in Crisis (FootHills). She is a Keats-Shelley Prize winner, and a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee.