ISSN: 1941-4137
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
Lynne Schmidt is the granddaughter of a Holocaust survivor, and a mental health professional with a focus in trauma and healing. She is the author of the chapbooks, Gravity (Nightingale and Sparrow Press) which was listed as one of the 17 Best Breakup Books to Read in 2020, and On Becoming a Role Model (Thirty West), which was featured on The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed for PTSD Awareness Week. Her work has received the Maine Nonfiction Award, Editor’s Choice Award, and was a 2018 and 2019 PNWA finalist for memoir and poetry respectively. Lynne was a five time 2019 Best of the Net Nominee, and an honorable mention for the Charles Bukowski and Doug Draime Poetry Awards. In 2012 she started the project, AbortionChat, which aims to lessen the stigma around abortion. When given the choice, Lynne prefers the company of her three dogs and one cat to humans.
Poets Resist
Edited by Len Lawson
August 15, 2020
Edited by Len Lawson
August 15, 2020
Necrophilia
— after “Taking Off Emily Dickinson’s Clothes” by Billy Collins
Years after you’re dead,
they will still spend time trying to remove your dress,
still spend time exploring your corpse as it lays still,
because though you should have the liberty to rest in peace,
they feel entitled to their pieces of your body, still.
In life,
I’m sure you would have written about them,
demolished them like a building,
would have bitten them with your teeth,
taken out chunks of skin and swallowed them whole.
They attack you in death,
because here, you won’t scream,
won’t breathe,
won’t be able to defend yourself
like the drunk women they find behind dumpsters.
But she was allowed to be drunk,
and you are allowed to be dead.
They will tell us that when it happens,
you are “a little wide eyed,”
as they strip you down,
mistaking flesh decayed corpse sockets
for eyes.
The men will praise this act of necrophilia,
offer awards and congratulations on the accomplishment,
see the beauty in violating yet another woman,
the perceived gentleness of the unbuttoning.
And the women will realize
living a real-time horror story,
that even in death,
we still aren’t safe from being raped.
Poets Resist is published by Glass Poetry Press.
All contents © the author.
All contents © the author.
