Poetry by Lynne Schmidt

               ​Dane CC




Maroon Dodge Ram 

with five bullet holes 
blasting through the driver’s side window.
 
Call a tow truck in the morning 
peel the vehicle off the street 
once the body is cold in the morgue. 

Call it gang violence,
talk about the people drinking champagne in the streets.

Call it drug deals 
remind the public he was throwing heroin out of his window 
before the police arrived. 

Show the photos of the spiderwebs in the glass, 
get close enough you’re able to count the holes
like a game of connect the dots.

Ensure the detachment from human, 
include every detail of all the horrible things he did 
since he started dealing drugs at the age of thirteen. 

Show the holes in the glass. 
Be careful to not show the blood stains. 
Because if you do, 
you might have to tell the public he was human, too. 

The photos show the maroon truck, 
riddled with golf ball sized bullet holes. 

The photos don’t show how for the better part of two years, 
a neighbor looked in a parking spot 
to see if the truck was parked
in the hopes of saying 
Hi, how was your day? 
Thank you for helping me.

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Lynne Schmidt is the grandchild of a Holocaust survivor, and a mental health professional with a focus in trauma and healing. She is the winner of the 2021 The Poetry Question Chapbook Contest, 2020 New Women's Voices Contest, a 2020 Pushcart nominee, and a ten time Best of the Net nominee. Lynne is the author of the chapbooks, SexyTime (forthcoming 2022) Dead Dog Poems (Finishing Line Press, 2021), Gravity (Nightingale and Sparrow Press, 2019) which was listed as one of the 100 Best Breakup Books of All Time by Book Authority, and On Becoming a Role Model (Thirty West, 2020), which was featured on The Wardrobe's Best Dressed for PTSD Awareness Week. In 2012 they started the project, AbortionChat, which aims to lessen the stigma around abortion. When given the choice, Lynne prefers the company of her three dogs and one cat to humans.
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