Purgatory by Lynne Schmidt

My love,
you expect this to hurt,
as though your absence has an effect on me,
like I am sitting near something
so that you can call out to me.
And you think I would wait
because your allegiance of friendship
is supposed to quell my
poor
aching
heart.
So I sit here and smile,
because my darling,
fire has bled through these veins,
and I have lived three days in purgatory,
and the heaven you think you’d put me through
is nothing like the hell I have lived through.

 

Lynne Schmidt is a mental health professional and an award winning poet and memoir author. She is the author of the poetry chapbooks, Gravity (Nightingale and Sparrow Press), and On Becoming a Role Model (Thirty West). 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 is a five time 2019 Best of the Net Nominee, and an honorable mention for the Charles Bukowski Poetry Award. 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.  

Advertisement