Two Poems from “My Sponsor Told Me to Break Plates”
We’re proud to feature these two poems from Annie Schumacher’s chapbook “My Sponsor Told Me to Break Plates,” which was selected by Valerie Smith as a finalist in The Headlight Review’s Chapbook Contest in the Spring of 2024.
On Persephone’s Night Terrors
Either I will fall asleep or I will not.
If I fall asleep either I will dream vividly or I will not.
If I dream vividly either I will wake up shaking and gasping for life’s breath or I will not.
If I wake up shaking and gasping for life’s breath it is because I am cursed or I am not.
If I am cursed it was because I was born cursed or I was not.
If I was born cursed either I inherited the curse from my mother (or not).
If I inherited the curse from my mother then she inherited the curse from her mother, did she not?
If I ask my mother’s mother about it she will either deny cursing my mother or she will not.
If she denies cursing my mother, will I stay in hell?
If I eventually fall asleep, I will be seeing and listening to everything at once, my senses fixed like a dog.
Where is the drug to drug this hell out of me?
I swallow the tablets like honey.
Even if I never fall asleep for fear of losing what I left, which is itself a kind of curse, I will swap out new hell for old hell, or I will not.
I wake to sticky green leaves.
Swans
It takes eight years to exit the pop music museum.Two older women, arms linked, dance to Waterloo.
We bought hats like that, we walked across a bridge
in Cuenca like that. When do you know someone?
When did I stop knowing you? My sadness spills
out a bouncy Swedish pop star’s lips,
the rising melody covering my heart in a brown sap.
The crowd carols along to the next song, searching
for cheap flights to Athens like we did. I peer through glass
at the metallic stage costumes, the headlong curve of my heart
-ache—were that it anger, I could hate the costumes.
I exit the pop music museum in heavy, platform-soled
tears. White birds sway in the water, my sister sings happy
birthday from a distant time zone. At what point in their
disillusionment did they transform?
These poems were featured in Volume 2, Issue 2. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.
