Laps
The trouble had passed—
or so we thought.
It had simply rounded the corner.
And uh-oh, here it comes again,
finger-pointing, looking for someone to blame.
You? Me? All the people crossing
The George Washington Bridge?
That time you kissed me,
I discovered a hair
growing from your ear.
Please, don’t tell me how it ends.
With all the vampires on the vampire assembly line
found to be defective, lunching
on gazpacho at noon
in the brilliant summer sunshine.
Cindy King is the author of a book-length collection, Zoonotic, and three chapbooks, Easy Street, Lesser Birds of Paradise, and Five for Nothing. Her manuscript, Fever Coat, won the C&R Poetry Book Award and will be published in 2026. Cindy’s work appears in Threepenny Review, The Sun, New England Review, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. Originally from Cleveland, Ohio, she currently lives in Utah, where she is a professor of creative writing at Utah Tech University and an editorial associate at Seneca Review and TriQuarterly. She recently joined the staff of Trio House Press.
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