Poetry by Kate Schmitt

                 Jacob Norlund CC



​The Dead Visit When I Sleep

Their hair has grown long
and the striped wallpaper

they lean on is faded pale as sherbet.
They are tired of our wants.  Tired,

I wake to the tinny sound of your breath.
The world slips another notch.

I get up and wait for dawn, 
the cat sitting at attention, thinking it’s breakfast.

My dream grandmother stood off to one side.
I asked, absurdly, How are you? 

instead of something important, 
like what her eyes saw in that last look 

at the room and in our faces looking back.  
The plastic jar and tube suspended, 

dripping the seconds, but slower, 
a crack spreading across the ceiling 

to the window like a branch 
reaching for the closest brightest light.



Kate Schmitt earned her M.F.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Houston. She is a visual artist as well as a writer, and her book Singing Bones won the Zone 3 Press Nonfiction Prize and was published in 2014. Her essays, poems, and visual work have appeared in a number of anthologies and literary journals, including The Rumpus, Driftwood Press, Third Coast, and The Florida Review. 
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