SHANGHaIED
I’d rather be dozing off
in a walled garden of fragrant roses;
instead, I’ve been shanghaied
onto a leaking privateer
crewed by the Seven Deadly Sins,
the worst of whom is a smiler
with a knife under his cloak, who,
swearing friendship, stalks me
closer and closer to the edge
until I leap over the rail
into an icy sea far from shore—
RESCUED
Let’s enter a time machine,
go back and treat all the
prematurely cut-off
literary consumptives
with courses of antibiotics,
which should cure them, since
they’ve not been around
to develop resistance. We’ll
rescue Keats, Chekhov,
D. H. Lawrence, Stephen Crane,
poor Alexander Pope
hunched to four foot six with
TB wracking his spine; even after
World War II and the first use
of streptomycin, there’s prophetic
George Orwell who died of it.
Thanks to us they’ll all live on
to produce prodigies
of brilliant writing—
just as you and I would,
if only we had the time.
Lynn Gilbert’s poems have appeared in The Banyan Review, Blue Unicorn, Concho River Review, Exquisite Corpse, Gnu, The Huron River Review, Kansas Quarterly, Light, Mezzo Cammin, Mortar, Peninsula Poets, Southwestern American Literature, and elsewhere. An associate editor at Third Wednesday journal, she has been a finalist in the Gerald Cable Book Award (2021) and Off the Grid Press book contests.