Crimes against Nature
- Mar 31, 2021
- 2 min read
by Lynne Schmidt
After “Your Life” by Andrea Gibson
When they tell you that you are a crime against nature smile and show them your teeth. Thank them for the compliment, for recognizing that yes, you are more powerful than your body dictates.
Your biology does not determine the rest of your life.
They will ask, what kind of monster doesn’t love their child? What kind of monster would view a pregnancy as a curse, wishing for cancer during the three minutes of purgatory where you are both pregnant and not pregnant at once?
They will never understand skin and bone as prison, because they will never have to.
A red crab will eat its own babies as they frantically gather around her feet. So how can they say that you, in all your wholeness, are unnatural?
When they offer to pray for you, remind them that penance is for sinners, and you’ve committed no crimes here.
They will try and try to shove their chain store top shelf grief down your throat, and look wide eyed when you dare have no shame.
They will call you an abomination, they will say you should have your tongue ripped out.
Just remind them, you, my darling, are only just now finding your voice.
Lynne Schmidt is the granddaughter of a Holocaust survivor, and mental health professional with a focus in trauma and healing. She is the winner of the 2020 New Women’s Voices Contest and author of the chapbooks Dead Dog Poems (forthcoming from Finishing Line Press), Gravity (Nightingale and Sparrow Press), which was listed as one of the 17 Best Breakup Books to Read in 2020, and On Becoming a Role Model (Thirty West), which was featured on The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed for PTSD Awareness Week. Her work has received the Maine Nonfiction Award, Editor’s Choice Award, and was a 2018 and 2019 PNWA finalist for memoir and poetry respectively. Lynne was a five time 2019 and 2020 Best of the Net Nominee, and an honorable mention for the Charles Bukowski and Doug Draime Poetry Awards. In 2012 she 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.
