Nowhere

Poems

Katie Schmid

• Publisher: UNM Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780826363077
• eBook ISBN: 9780826363084
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Poetry
• Index: Literature

A book of wild imagination and linguistic play, Nowhere begins by chronicling the pain that the speaker and her absent father endure during the years they are separated while he is in prison. The alternative universe the speaker builds in order to survive this complex loss and its aftermath sees her experimenting with her body to try to build connection, giving it away to careless and indifferent lovers as she dreams of consuming them in the search for a coherent self. But can the speaker voice her trauma and disjunction? Can anyone, or is suffering something that cannot be said, but only hinted at? Ultimately the book argues that the barest hour of suffering can be the source of immense creative power and energy, which is the speaker’s highest form of consolation.

This brilliant debut collection offers cohesive trauma narratives and essential counter-narratives to addiction stories, and it consistently complicates the stories told by the world about so-called fatherless girls and the bodies of women.

three

But how do you choose your form? How do you choose
your name? How do you choose your life?

—JOANNA NEWSOM, “DIVERS”

A Nightmare Is a Body and Your Father Gone

A nightmare is a Body and your father gone,

& time is the road you travel to him.

& in the Body clocks all stopped & in the Body

time unclocked & “doing time”—the father does it

& you—the Body—do it too. The Body is heavy

now with time, with all the stories told of time:

“It’s not so long” & “Don’t forget” &—sweetest—

“there will still be time,” those myths against

time’s length & memory & grief.

The father’s body clocks his time

in letters, in lost hair, lost teeth, in muscle gained &

places secret, unseen, unknown and loved—

the Body holds its time inside, an organ called

the gonefather: that little velvet pocket & a cloud

cast on the heart. You don’t know how

to say it but the Body can, it must,

Body clinging to the bodies of the Uncles,

those fathers of children not-you.

Sweet brittle persistent body,

clutching the father’s artifacts & dust,

eating the father’s letters until sick with glut.

Body, your very composition is an absence

& lay you down to sleep in his T-shirts

& be now the child & be the father both

& hold your little self & hold the gonefather

at your center & make of it a timeless world:

throw up your firmament of eternal tears.

The lack at the heart of you is your making, the lack

at the heart of you is where you learn to make.

Good Girl

A man with his hands in my mouth

asked me was I okay. Was I feeling it?

Was I going to do anything

this weekend?

Underneath the drilling

my mouth alternately

roiled a blood-pink froth

and lay dormant,

its little animal will

silent and watchful.

The blue silicone really is the best,

said the man to the woman

who held the implements.

Let’s use the blue from now on,

said the man. Katie, he said

(his hands tending

my little garden of rot),

what do you prefer?

Katie or Kate? Katie you are

so patient, thank you, you are

so patient. And I lay in the chair

holding my smile.

Nowhere

I left work

and walked down Prospect

past the Long John Silver’s,

the Mexican place, the Jiffy

Lube, the gas station, the liquor store

where, in the parking lot, a man

held his woman by the wrist

and steered her into the frigid

bounty of the shop. She could

barely stand. She sprawled,

belly down on the counter, laughing.

At the light a man rode up

on a bike and looked me up

then down. Baby my car’s

in the shop, but if it wasn’t

I would take you anywhere

you wanted to go. I thought

of the gas station, the cold

of it, the fluorescent donuts

in their case, the rows

of colorful, flavored gums

with heavenly names.

I once walked in there

to buy a pack of gum

and stayed for an hour.

The impossible choice.

The mango pineapple oasis,

the waterberry splash.

The cool-mint melondream

breeze. So I jumped on the handlebars.

Down Prospect, the fast food

joints just fast rainbows now,

I could see the way cumulus

clouds of fry grease hung above

the places like the threat of a storm.

Faster and faster now, the trees whipping

by in a fury of green. The city,

the highway, the exhale of farms.

Orange sun setting like a sick egg.

And into another state altogether.

No one knows us here, he said,

and I held him tighter while we ghosted

slowly through humid neighborhoods,

warped houses that teemed

with dead cars, with guinea pig

colonies, with wan families

and their mashed-potato dinners.

We set up home. We made Wednesday

night spaghetti night. He rode

his bike for pay, and in the mornings

out back I tended to the guinea pigs,

their bodies moving through

the high grass like tiny housecats

stalking their prey. They were untame,

majestic. They were a horde of mouths

under the house. At dawn I saw them

teeming the ceiling. They’d scatter

like bugs when I got a glass of water

in the kitchen. They were dear to me.

And then one day the wind came

in the house. Nothing stayed put.

The papers, the pigs, the furniture began

to beat at me. Tornadoes in the kitchen,

tornadoes of fur and plates.

We have to leave, I said. The wind

is in the house. The wind is

the house. Everything is wild

and cruel. So he got his bike.

Past the grey houses, the cold lawns,

the dead cars, the wan little girls chalking

up the street. The pigs fanned out

behind us, a furry retinue. But in the end

they flagged. Short legs.

Past the city limits, the moneyed suburbs,

the miles and miles of inedible corn.

Where are we going now, he said. Nowhere,

I said. They’re still behind us, I said.

Keep going, I said. Faster, faster.

It’s going to be great. It’s going to be

like nothing you’ve ever seen.

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• one
• two
• three
• Acknowledgments
• Notes