Lindsay M. D’Andrea

Poetry

Lindsay M. D’Andrea holds an MFA in creative writing from Iowa State University. Her fiction, poetry, and nonfiction has appeared in many print and digital publications including The Greensboro Review, Pamplemousse, The Longleaf Review, and Puerto del Sol. She lives in the Philadelphia area, where you may find her making linocut prints or working toward her first collection of poetry after her kids are asleep.

 

Premonition

No one can say I didn’t warn them. We’re finally afraid, mostly of each other. Seas have been rising in my dreams since I was born, and now here we are— my snow-illusion of Future. I don silver pants, tin foil hat, gas mask and have a laugh at myself for wondering so often of ends. End of a rope, a line, a year, a road. End of filling my cart with flour for failed bread. End of fact, in fact. Before—after the house burned down, my father said the fire would teach us to change. Instead we learned to live with char. Soot lined my palms for decades. The wrong whiff of it still lives inside the old washing machine. Wherever I construct a new bunker, the ghost of that first ending follows. I let it.

“ I find myself pulled toward nontraditional sonnets that fight with their own constraints, and as I sat with this poem I realized it wanted to become one of those troublemaker sonnets. At the volta, a list unravels into a particular moment that crystalizes the speaker’s anxiety. This poem emerged from an initial question: can a persistent worry that becomes a reality be considered a premonition—and in any case, what happens to it after that point? I hope this poem speaks to how we deal with larger concerns and worries for our world, especially in the post-pandemic landscape. ”

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