On the Stairs, Constellation, I hope I find him beneath flowers, If spring was a person...
On the Stairs
Tutoring in a school,
We undergo a lockdown drill.
They’ve started color coding the types of drills – red, orange, yellow –
Like first-grade teachers separating craft supplies – green for scissors, blue for glue sticks.
The teacher points to a can of Raid Bug Spray
It has a range of twenty-two feet; further than pepper spray, and allowed in schools.
“I keep it in the classroom not to kill bugs, but to keep
the children’s intestines from being splattered on the walls, like green ooze on a flyswatter.
I set a reminder on my phone to purchase a can of Raid.
Later that night, my mother calls. “Did you hear About the book bans?”
There’s an NBC News article.
“Library Director Christine Kujawa at Bismarck Veterans Memorial Public Library
said the library has a book with two little hamsters on the cover. At the end of the book, the hamsters get married, and they are both male.
it would be considered pornography under the bill.”
This is dystopian; fahrenheit 451; this is our worst; the book thie
North Dakota has officially decided that books are more damaging to students
then a bullet in the head.
The weight of losing a child is unbearable: My mother buried two babies,
and I will never understand why cemeteries are a setting for horror films.
Even if you consider two men to be pornographic,
would you rather your child be witness to love you don’t support
or be their chaperone to their best friend’s funeral?
I can tell you the devastation of a child’s funeral:
It is a casket, three sizes too small.
It is it’s own section of the cemetery.
It is a flat gravestone; all babies have them in my town.
It reads “beloved daughters”, but not mothers, or wives
It is your little brother, asking your mother,
“How long did I die for?” because he doesn’t understand.
It is this hollowness in knowing you will never be able to braid your sisters’ hair.
I don’t want to watch the youth section of the cemetery grow like wildflowers.
If I die in school shooting,
place my body on the stairs of congress so that they can carry the same burden
as my little siblings.
Constellation
You refuse to wear an open
back shirt, bit I will
place a pimple-patch star
on every bump and
call you a constellation
I hope I find him beneath flowers
because I never want
him to touch another.
To carve their bodies:
finger inside,
scooping out the eggs,
scooping out the future.
To carve their hearts out:
gatekeep slicing your skin by the barriers
of scars.
I hope to read his eulogy
on a summer day
with a glass of lemonade served from a mason jar,
“beloved son and brother…”
I will weep for the family, and I will celebrate for young women
In the way that noise-canceling headphones
are surround sound encompassing only you,
so is he
I am out at sea, holding my head under the water so that I cannot fall asleep,
Hair flowing around my skull like a mermaid.
It is beautiful, yet dangerous.
He never learned the difference
You cannot learn from which you do not know is wrong;
he was napalm – something that sounds like a
budding flower, but has scarred Vietnamese children beyond repair
I will place flowers on his grave and thank God
that he was taken from us.
If spring was a person…
If spring, and I mean spring as in the season of rebirth, was a person,
she would be God.
I think God would wear shiny, white and purple pearls
and silver rings wrapped around each of her fingers,
the way the vine on my plant is wrapped around
the controls of a blind, grasping light
with desperation.
I think God would walk barefoot.
I think God would be a woman of few words.
I think I would fall in love with God.
We should fear, love, and trust God above all things.
Spring makes the leaves curl outward while I cur
inward. I am avoidant,
terrified of summer. I cannot remember the last summer my heart felt warm.
Spring is false hope.
God is false hope.
I am bent down at the alter, weeding the flower bed,
watering the plants with my tears.
Name: Lilly Schmidt – On the Stairs (Poetry)