Katie Schmid


False starts


In the dead center of my fourth decade
I still find all the beauty singed by a cruel flame.

I catch myself trying to draw a circle
of protection around what I love,

as if love was about protection.

I still find myself in the sliced cheese aisle
thinking idly about killing myself, a little

reflex, a little vestigial digit left over
from my twenties.

On the way home from the grocery store
I am struck

by the lambent halo of the streetlight.
It bleeds a corona of butter

onto the low branches of a maple—
leaves ghostly, golden, transformed under

that false eye—so the antic limbs of the trees
seem shocked into visibility. Haunted by it.

And there in the car, before I can correct myself
I am back on the psych ward, where I was allowed

to knit if I did it in the rec room,
in front of the plate glass window

where the night nurse could watch me.
I knit alone in the room, under her gaze.

The room and the nurse’s desk the only light
on the ward, a bright square, burning.

She kept a quiet watch over my little life.
I remember feeling drenched in her eyes,

a safety so complete it was clinical—
she guided our raft of light into the future.


God-machine


I told her I was frightened and she laughed
what, of horses? but at night they come into

the camp and circling the tents, they huff
and to feel their breath against my face as I

sleep, I dream of creatures prehistoric calling
me back, and wake: sure the horses are god-

machines thinly disguised in stiff, coarse fur.
I am not brave. I have seen the divine and, cowed,

asked what do you want, as if the divine could
want, as if the divine was not the opening

into nothing, a brief joyride of narrative giving
way to an abyss, like coasting on the rainbow

road until you slip off the edge into the dark.
And no pit boss to bring you back. When I

take the dog out at night how she wants
to sprint because she can almost fly out

of herself, how she might peel out and peel
off the dog, so just the essence of dog remains,

little lush blip of longing, maybe just a tongue.
When I think about my death and the shimmer

of it, the shadow cast by my life, it seems
to touch me when invited, filmy and wet and

clinging to my skin and oh I could welcome it
ghost that is the only thing I own, my own infinity

where I am the world and I am the end of it
and it turns its charred face to mine and opens

Also by Katie Schmid: "Polaroid," "Loving an Addict"

Katie Schmid

Katie Schmid has a book of poems, eat the dream, forthcoming from University of New Mexico Press.

ISSN 2472-338X
© 2020