Death Benefit, by Dave Northrup

My financial advisor
wants me to hedge against
what he calls
longevity risk.
How strange to hear long life
presented as a danger.
He gives me a look
when I mention

the risk-free benefits
of long-term death,
its dividends secure
in perpetuity.

Dave Northrup’s fiction is set exclusively in the eastern Mohawk Valley of upstate New York and often deals with characters coming of age in a region that in the course of the twentieth century has suffered the economic and social upheaval characteristic of the American South during the 1800’s.

© 2011, Dave Northrup