Poetry from Lynn Schmeidler

Photo by Jason Wong

Six Ways I See You Trapped in History

1.
You know a few things
about time, like how it stretches
under covers and how it hides
in clumps of grass.

2.
Winter won’t let you
go. You think like a
goldfinch. Your hands
do not agree with your arms.

3.
There’s a lot you could say
about sailing the Panama
Canal with your mother,
but you won’t bother.

4.
You’re thirteen when
Isadora Duncan dies
of a long silk scarf
and an open-air drive.

5.
Hope hangs around you
like a too-big pair of pants
and your friends call
to you in their sleep.

6.
We love you
as we used to love dandelions–
their pinwheels and then
their ghosts.
.

.

Lynn Schmeidler‘s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in numerous literary magazines including The Awl, Barrow Street, Boston Review, Cider Press Review, Comstock Review, Fence, The Los Angeles Review, New Delta Review, Night Train, Opium, The Pedestal Magazine, Posit, Room, Saw Palm, SLAB, Tinderbox Poetry Journal and White Stag, as well as various anthologies including Transition: Poems in the Aftermath (Indolent Books), Drawn to Marvel: Poems from the Comic Books (Minor Arcana Press), Mischief, Caprice and Other Poetic Strategies (Red Hen Press), Out of Sequence: The Sonnets Remixed (Parlor Press), Bared (Les Femmes Folles Books), Forgotten Women (Grayson Books) and Nasty Women’s Poetry Anthology: An Unapologetic Anthology of Subversive Verse (Lost Horse Press).

Her chapbook, Wrack Lines, is available from Grayson Books http://graysonbooks.com/wrack-lines.html. Her most recent poetry manuscript, History of Gone, from which this poem is taken, was a finalist for the 2016 Eyewear Publishing Sexton Prize and is forthcoming from Veliz Books https://squareup.com/store/veliz-books/item/history-of-gone-by-lynn-schmeidler.