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Up the Staircase presents
Heather Ann Schmidt

Ode to a Pablo Neruda Nude

Neruda said Naked, you are as blue as a night in Cuba...

but, as I watch you, naked in this bed next to me,
your midnight is greater and swells over
the Gulf of Mexico and covers the Keys
and the end of your laugh crashes on its rocky shoreline
onto the evening bonfires of fisherman.

No-- as you lie here, you are thread piercing tiny yellow stitches
that frame the constellations mythology built.

Your blue tastes like a grove of orange flowers

cover me...
cover me before you evaporate.

 Qasida for Hibiscus

Red hibiscus--
my love laid before you in summer,
a skirt open from twirling.

Red hibiscus--
a dance among the dust in the streets,
blood, not dark enough--
blood that doesn't match
the crushed petals laid upon these streets.

Red hibiscus--
the four chambers of the heart-
separate yet entwined like the elements of
wind, water, earth, fire.

 Heather Ann Schmidt received her MFA in Poetry from National University, where she is currently working on her MA in English Literature. She teaches writing at Oakland Community College and ITT Technical Institute and is the publisher for recycled karma press. She also edits the online and print journal tinfoildresses. Her chapbooks are: Issa's Spider (Victorian Violet Press, 2010), Matryoshkas (Victorian Violet Press, 2010), The Bat's Lovesong: American Haiku (Crisis Chronicles Press, 2009), Channeling Isadora Duncan( Gold Wake Press, 2009) and Njaa (recycled karma press, 2008). Her books are: On Recalling Life Through the Eye of the Needle(Village Green Press, 2010) and The Owl & the Muse: Collected Tanka( recycled karma press, 2009); Forthcoming poetry collections are Transient Angels( Crisis Chronicles Press) and Red Hibiscus (Crisis Chronicles Press). Her website is HeatherAnnSchmidt.yolasite.com.

Against the Midnight

Every mother knows
When the moon is in the middle
Of the night sky and Ursa Major
Has passed over roofs
To the other side of midnight.

I know because I sleep lighter,
Listening for my son’s gasping breath
Or my daughter’s murmuring of a word
She can’t say during the day.
I know because I wade into the fear
That surrounds their beds
Up to my knees and I grab hold of it
Wrestling against the midnight,
The indigo clouds.

To be a mother is to dissect fear
And scoop its insides out
Throwing them in the metal dish,
Classifying them, numbering them
And adding another index card
To the catalog—
To remember when they can’t
So they don’t have to carry it
Out into the world.

In Ahkmatova's Shadow

In Akhmatova's shadow

I will stand in a

chrysanthemum dress

that loses its petals

in the wind.


I was a new bride once

and prayed to the icons

for a pure heart.


Maybe I am a reincarnation of

the woman in Kiev

in 1909 who stood

by the window

watching a requiem

take place on the ground

below--


the grass remembering your footprints,

the locust trees blooming white in your hands.