Schmidt shows why humor, humility, and humane have a common root. Many of her poem titles sound like premises for a stand-up comedy sketch: “Why I Am Not a Taxidermist“; “My Grandfather’s Balls”; “Portrait of My Parents Making Love as a Stomach Virus“. Each time, however, the poem takes a surprising turn, reversing the typical use of disgust to create distance and superiority, and instead breaking down the pretensions that alienate us.

Lauren and Main Street Rag have kindly permitted me to reprint the poem below, which first appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review. For more about her work, enjoy this interview on the Splinter Generation blog.

The Waiting Room of Past Lives

No one likes it here. You can tell
by our bodies: this one chews
his cuticles; that one pretends
to read. A woman fingers the drag
in her stockings. A man watches
from across the room, blowing steam
from his third cup of sludge.
He’s used up all the stirrers.
The girl behind the blurred glass
snaps her gum, watches the clock
for five. On the wall, CNN

bleats something about this
or that. The war here or there.
There seems to be only one channel,
but nobody bothers to check. We wait
in the glow of the red numbers. Now
Serving, the sign says. We pinch our slips
as if waiting for lunchmeat.

It gets harder and harder to do this.
They put a note in my file. It explains
the crutches, the bandage on my brow.
I was eighty then, collapsed in the hedges
racking my brain for the line that came
before the dish ran away with the spoon.
When you’re eighty you don’t always
remember. The last time I was eighty,
I left notes on my front door
should a visitor happen by: Be right back,
in the bathroom, scrawled by my shaky hand,

letters like the eyelashes I pulled out
with my fingers and arranged
in my notebook during Physics
in the life before that. I loved
to watch them scatter in one full
breath, didn’t care much that girls
stared at my nest of hair or laughed
at my penchant for saying silly things.
I chose my words carefully,
spelled them with my lashes.

By senior year, I had no brows
left either: two bleached seams
arched above my eyes, an eternity
of expressing horrified surprise.
My mother made them draw brows
so I wouldn’t look strange
in the casket. The irony, too much
for the man I shared it with here,
in the waiting room, a man
whose laughter made his jaw click,
like the snap of my infant neck
in the life I had that didn’t last very long.
My memory went only as far
as the garden of my mother’s
hair when she hovered above my crib

to kiss me. In the life where I learned
what it meant to be a father,
I put my nose to the rose of my son’s
lips, waited for breath, contented
just to watch his infant chest rise
and fall. I recall the feel of my own

stuttered breast as I lay in my mess
of wings in the middle of the street.
After the windshield, I remembered
the boy, the rock, the way he lifted
it above his head. Its shadow trembled
above me, dilating as it broke over me
like a dark corsage before the lights
went out and I was back in line again.
The rock was something like mercy,
but do we really have the words
for the magician’s hat of how

our lives are made and taken? We’re rabbits
blinking in stiff confusion, some big hand
fisted around the ears, feet, kicking, pendulous,
and marking time. Sometimes we’re a flurry
of doves in a round of applause. I have been
the rabbit, would be the rabbit again
because there simply is no lover
more eager to be in the world.
I have been the boy with his pellet gun, too,
a piece of wheat in my teeth and nothing to do
but wonder what a tuft of hair looks like
when it erupts with blood, wonder the sound
flesh makes when it’s pulled from fur
which isn’t anything like the sound
of denim ripping as you might think.

On CNN there is a man on his knees.
Dirty shirt, holes in his jeans.
Another man grips his hair, dark tufts
sprout between his fingers. In the other fist,
the flash of a murky blade. The man’s eyes
are lurched wide from his pulled hairline.
The shadow of the blade breaks over

a shaking face. This one stops chewing
his cuticles. That one stops pretending
to read. The woman leaves her stockings
alone and the man stops watching her.
All eyes gaze at the TV screen. We don’t see
the rest, but everybody knows what happens
next. With any luck, the man on his knees
will wake up praying near a bed
in a room he somehow knows is his.

Cooper’s poetry chapbook A Knot of Worms was published this summer by Finishing Line Press in their New Women’s Voices series. These quiet poems are charged with a sacred attention to healing the wounds sustained by our bodies and ecosystem. In the aftermath of war or illness, the human spirit finds wholeness by recovering our common bond with whales, dragonflies, and yes, even worms. She kindly shares two sample poems below. “Ashes” was first published in Poetry Northwest.

Ashes

She will not do
what you expect, not even
if you make love to her.
She can never tell
what she has learned,
no matter how safely
she rests under your arm.
But one day, she may open a jar
she brought from that place.
She will say
it holds the burnt bones
of hands, just the hands,
of people she has known.
Though it cannot possibly
be true, you’ll believe her.
You’ll pour out
her pieces of calcium
as if they were uncut jewels.
You’ll sort through them,
wondering which bone
was the finger of a thief,
which held a violin,
and how the tiny ones
could have belonged to anybody
but a child.
Then you will see
why she can be so positive
that we are all joined.
There will never be a way
to separate these friends.

****

After the Man Who Counted Dragonflies

died, he opened his eyes and discovered
he was still in Oregon, his research tent
still pitched in a forest of pines
near the edge of a snow-fed, mile-high lake.
He took off his clothes and walked
across the beach pebbles hot as coals,
splashed into icy water— a contrast which,
if he did say so just to himself, felt heavenly.
Apparently, it was still July. A blue darner
dragonfly touched down on his index finger.
He saw the indelible ink dots he’d used
to mark the animal, a pattern recorded
by date for an insect whose life cycle
ended long ago. He wanted to ask him,
a male he’d decorated, the question
that had deviled him in life. He raised
his arm skyward, but before he could speak
more of his subjects joined them. By tens,
then hundreds and finally by thousands
his friends flew to greet him. Nymphs
he had saved from extinction cracked
their shells, split open, crawled up a reed
and darted into summer. They all whirled
around the man, a blue darner wind. Then,
they landed in a mosaic of iridescence—
their wing tips touching randomly in what
looked like sunshine— while his spirit
skittered over acres of their humming surface.
As the sun lowered, he realized that there
might be darkness. At last, he thought,
they would show him what nobody on earth
could find— where they go at night.