June 15, 2023

Lauren Schmidt

WHY I AM NOT A TAXIDERMIST

I am not a taxidermist, I am afraid of John Wayne.
A guest at Uncle’s house, I slept in The John Wayne Room.
It was called The John Wayne Room as if a room
such as this could have another name: a life-size
cardboard form of John Wayne in the Western
She Wore a Yellow Ribbon. The plot not to be confused
with that story where the woman’s head falls off
as her husband unties the ribbon’s silky knot secured
around her neck. The secret she kept her whole life
from the man she loved, a private strangeness
such as having, in your home, The John Wayne Room.

Egyptians dehydrated the human body by extracting
soft tissues. The torso, left intact so the soul, an airy thing,
could find its likeness in the afterlife. In this room,
John Wayne’s soul would have a number of likenesses
to confuse for the original John Wayne. The most alarming
of which is the John in a Box which is just as it sounds
except that it was not a box but a buck with a tail
for a crank, then: Pop goes the John Wayne.

Who thought of this is less disturbing than who would
buy this except I know the answer. I would have
John Wayne stuffed and mounted in The John Wayne Room
to look at when I’m an old man, Uncle declared.
I am not a taxidermist because I read “A Rose for Emily”
in high school and I know the need to keep something,
everything, long after it is gone, like youth, like love,
the longing to take it all with me because what is memory if not
the cadence of colliding, forgotten things, cymbals
that tempt a tremor from the body’s core and wake

that thing inside? I am not a taxidermist because I would stuff
my dog the time he got his head stuck in the railing
of our stoop. His leather tongue lapped happily at his dish
as sparks darted around his head from the iron cutters
like the squirrels he was about to chase, mad with desire.
I am not a taxidermist because I would pull the skin
off the kind of sleep I got as a kid, drape it around me
so I could remember what it’s like to be ten again.
I would freeze-dry the first time I let music move inside me
like a sinuous being, fit to romp for days. Yes, the sadness

of these things gone, but I am not a taxidermist
because how do I find the exact eyes Tracey had,
shiny with tears, shaking, when she looked at me,
her father’s fist blued into the knob of her chin?
Or her body the night she huddled beneath my porch light
over a spread of Gin Rummy at midnight, that terrible hand
just across the street. Then the girl with the strange name
in ninth grade, the girl with those cheeks, pocked and red
and pus-capped, that frantic hair, I would mount her
on a shelf so I could look at her, wonder why I wasn’t nicer.

I am not a taxidermist because I would cast all the women
from now that I might never get to be, shake my fist at them
and demand a list of failures. I am not a taxidermist because
one day I would sit surrounded in my John Wayne Room
of All I Wished Forgotten. People in town would wonder
about me, rumor what they don’t know. And I,
an old lady in a rocking chair, would stare stolidly
at the hybrid creature of trauma and whiskey sickness,
the griffin myth of if I woke to her groping me
the way I swore she did while I stirred from sleep
in my dormitory bed. Too afraid then to confront
that beast, now I’d stuff it, I’d give it back its teeth.

from Rattle #34, Winter 2010
Neil Postman Award Winner

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Lauren Schmidt: “I often worry that I am a lousy poet since much of what I write about comes from the shit I couldn’t possibly make up on my own. There is, then, nothing clever for me to say here. Boo.” (web)

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October 23, 2014

Lauren Schmidt

MY FATHER ASKS ME TO KILL HIM

When our neighbor rolled past,
or the mold of him, much older
from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis,
you noted, over your shoulder, how it’s only

been a year. A year since he could hear
his name and nod, a year since he could
believe in a reason for being here,
on this beach street, alive, or seeming.

You looked at me. Something pushed up
through you like a wave of hooks. You took

your fingers, your index and middle,
slid them underneath your chin. Pressed
deeply, the skin sinking in,

cocked your thumb, locked and loaded,
you blew your top off, rocked
your head back. Your lips popped

a fake gun. You made me say
I’d take your days away, your pain,
you made me say I’d shame you less

than a disease like ALS. Except, not a weapon.
Instead, a push down the steps or a deft wrench
of your neck, a heavy deck to your head.

I’d drop a drug in your blood, bludgeon
you till you’re the ruddy muck of you,
stuff your head in the bathtub till the bubbles
won’t come. Out of love, father, out of love,

because you asked me to. I would
ruin you. Because you asked me to,
I would ruin you. Because you
asked me to, because you asked me to.

from Rattle #43, Spring 2014
Tribute to Love Poems

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Lauren Schmidt: “I volunteer teaching a weekly poetry workshop at a transitional housing program for homeless mothers. In these sessions, we read poetry, we write poetry, and sometimes, when I’m lucky, I can convince local poets to read their work to the women and talk about why poetry is so essential to survival. And every week something miraculous happens. The women say something they weren’t able to say, or they give themselves permission to feel something they’ve never felt, or they find the kind of validation they need to defend themselves against their difficult circumstances. Over and over again, poetry makes these miracles happen.”

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