Photo by Ken Lund / CC BY

she was short & pretty with as I remember huge green eyes & when the cops circled my car at the supermarket since I had out-of-state plates, so I must be a one-woman crime wave, the cashier was absolutely open with me & with the truckers who ordered coffee, then let it go cold on the counter before they drank it because Word of Wisdom, Joseph Smith. & then one weekend when I came in to see her she was gone, she & her boyfriend had emptied the register & lit out & I never heard whether they got her, I was mostly alone there except for the Merkels from Minnesota who lived one field over but went back to Minnesota, I didn’t stay either. Southeast Idaho later had a huge earthquake & I didn’t cause it, I never stole anything either, I missed that cashier every day, there is always a different disaster. I have looked up the name of the mountain behind Soda Springs & it’s Chester Hill & it’s 6407 feet so why is it a hill & not a mountain, if Buckskin Mountain nearby is only 6398 feet.

Laurinda Lind lives in New York’s North Country, near Canada. Some of her poems are in Atlanta Review, New American Writing, Paterson Literary Review, and Spillway. She is a Keats-Shelley Prize winner and a finalist in six other recent competitions. “When I Lived in Soda Springs …” originally appeared in High Desert Journal.