LYNNE SCHMIDT

When it happens, you let it happen

In January 2022, my aunt died from COVID. This piece explores being with her, alone, at her deathbed, with full PPE on.

My aunt gave me this command
asked “Can you handle this?”

I lied and told her yes,
and pulled up a chair,

and watched my babcia breathe
in and out and in and out and in.

My aunt came back,
and we sat for hours.

My partner brought food,
and we sat vigil, pausing at times,

to see if the breathing had stopped.
Years later, I sit alone at her bedside.

The ceremony is the same, but substantially different.
Previously she would be the one to foresight,

“It will be eight hours”
And now, it is me telling me mother,

“She won’t last until tomorrow.”
Wrapped in plastic, I hold her fever.

I chant meditations to her,
“you have nothing else to do,

Nowhere else to be,
Just right here,

Right now.”
I tell her I get it now,

Why she sent me away before because I wasn’t ready then.
I tell her I am now.

I promise, I can handle it.
If and only if so this way, she does not die alone.

And as her breathing accelerates,
I grab her hand one final time.

I tell her loud enough any God within earshot can hear,
“I love you”

And she exhales
and her body

lets go.

Lynne Schmidt is the grandchild of a Holocaust survivor. They were a semi-finalist for the 2022 Button Poetry Chapbook Contest, and the winner of the 2021 The Poetry Question Chapbook Contest, and 2020 New Women’s Voices Contest. Lynne is the author of the chapbooks, SexyTime (TPQ 2022), Dead Dog Poems (Finishing Line Press, 2021), Gravity (Nightingale and Sparrow Press, 2019), and On Becoming a Role Model (Thirty West, 2020). 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 pack of dogs and one cat to humans.

MORE FROM SUMMER 2022 (4:1)

PROSE

2021 Prose Chapbook Winner
Resistance, Sue Mell (an excerpt)
A Conversation with Sue Mell and Sara Siddiqui Chansarkar, Prose Chapbook Winner and Finalist, Maria S. Picone, Managing Editor

Cataloging Ghosts, Carlos Contreras
Dalí, Renée Jessica Tan
How To Use Your Father’s Lawn Mower, Yasmin Nadiyah Phillip
Our Trespassing, Joel Worford
The Puddling, Mattea Heller

POETRY

Il Lupo Mannaro, Stephanie Staab
When it happens, you let it happen, Lynne Schmidt
Holiday Party 2017, Kim Ellingson
Ninety Days, Remi Recchia
The Universe, as in One Last Song for the Lonely Hearts, Michelle Hulan
Saudade Accuses Brown Girl, Yvanna Vien Tica
windmills over Zaandam, Gabriela Gonzales
Fold the Shadows, Cate McGowan
Intercession, Sasha Wade

ART

Fluidity, Patrick van Raalten
Yellow Purse, William C. Crawford
Blankness Was the Beauty, Carolyn Guinzio
Telephone, Moses Ojo
Skin Over Milk Cover Art, Oormila Vijayakrishnan Prahlad
Egress, Phil Temples