Katie Schmid, nowhere: poems

 

Some Boys of the Midwest
            After Ben Marcus

Boys court me. We leave the restaurant, where they sat uncomfortable and did not know where to put their elbows. Shyly they take my hand to help me into the car. Shyly they part the sea of empty Mountain Dew cans in the back seat and reach for me, leave their bites all over me. The boys are unwashed and smell like food—as if they have been lightly battered and fried in their own grease. The boys hold my hands in theirs until they begin to ache. The parking lot empties, leaving a vast ocean of tar under yellow light. It is five in the morning. A wild red fox streaks past the car, something wriggling in his mouth. Even in the dark, it is easy to tell who consumes who.

Lincoln, Nebraska poet Katie Schmid’s full-length debut is nowhere: poems (Albuquerque NM: University of New Mexico Press, 2021), a startling collection of poems around coming-of-age, sex and power, female agency and loss, including, as the back cover offers, “chronicling the pain that the speaker and her absent father endure during the years they are separated while he is in prison.” Hers are a sequence of dark, midwestern narratives around absence, emotional distance and old boyfriends, haunted by history and its impact, and a world experienced through the lens of such an incredibly large and early absence. “Because I survived,” she writes, to open the poem “Crown of Eyes,” “it became a story / I owed to anyone who asked.” Writing very much from the inside of a consideration of “fatherless girls and the bodies of women,” Schmid speaks bluntly of how the heart develops callouses from wear, and what in her world might be considered weakness, and what might be considered strength. She writes of the absence of a father, even after he returns, and the complications of that absence. She writes of myth and the hard lessons of real life, and the occasional conflict between the two; of exhaltation, exhaustion and a possible escape or salvation that never quite arrives. As the end of the two-page poem “A Nightmare Is a Body and / Your Father Gone” offers: “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.”

She writes of loss and pregnancy, poems that move into the endless sadness of miscarriage. “It is wrong to want // the impossible,” she writes, towards the end of “The Island of Lost Things,” “to continue wanting, as if the wanting / is an action, and besides, the lost things are alive now, / as if the state of being lost // has breathed blood and health into their frames. / The nurse sounds the depths of my stomach / as if it were an ocean, // as if the island is hard to find, though I feel it / rise under my skin. In this moment before elation / or disaster, I’ve lived my whole life.” There is a hope her poems cling to, even despite herself, one that refuses to let go, despite all evidence; and perhaps this, beyond all else, is the thread that ties these narratives together, and allow them the possibility of not dragging her completely under.

Her poems have both narrative and emotional force, offering a cadence that rolls along with a cadence that unfolds at contemplative speeds, one that allows her thoughtful lyric the space it requires. The only moment I can catch otherwise is in the poem “All My Boyfriends Love / My Father the Best,” a piece that, however stunning, reads a bit truncated at the very end, almost as though the spacings were shunted for the sake of not having to move a line or two to the next page:

                                            […] I can see them squinting
            he's everything

they ever dreamed and a Jungian too—and I know
that love where you try so hard to get someone

to see you and it feels like you’ll never be let in
to the mysterious house that you know from distant

observation is the most beautiful house, that you know
from closest study        everything
but what it’s like to step inside