by Lauren Marie Schmidt
Morning in December, doors still locked, playground grass stiff and white
with ice, when the warning call from a neighboring school comes in:
Active Shooter. Kids are ushered off the bus, their harried breaths,
like small puffs of smoke, cloak their faces. Each one surrenders
their backpacks, methodic as an assembly-line, then a single-file march
to the cafegymatorium: Stop and Search first thing in the morning.
Backpacks line the hallway, slouch against the walls, tipped over
like sleeping teens in the too-early dark of the morning bus ride.
We will not let anyone leave till we’ve checked every bag, Principal says,
then walks around with a box of latex gloves, holding out only one
for each of us, the withered skins of palms and fingers. It doesn’t fit.
Its elastic band snaps, cinches the skin, snags the invisible hairs
on my wrists. It winces, I don’t want to do this—because I know what
I will find: not guns or drugs or knives, but tampons, and a fresh pair
of underwear, lotion that smells like peaches, a change of clothes
for gym class, a sack of tissues, its plastic worn thin, sandwich
crushed by the pointed corners of American History II, jelly the color
of blood, smudged against the inside skin of the bag. I will find body
spray and cologne, half-used sticks of deodorant. I will find notebooks
with spiral bindings, uncapped and leaky pens, the August Wilson play
I teach these kids when they reach ninth grade. Still, I rifle through
the spilled bodies of backpacks, my gloved hand full of grime.
Lauren Marie Schmidt is the author of Filthy Labors, based on her experience teaching at a transitional housing program for homeless women in New Jersey, and several other collections of poems, including Psalms of the Dining Room, based on her experience volunteering at a soup kitchen in Eugene, OR. Currently, she runs a poetry program at New View, a rehabilitation program for women in Western Massachusetts, and teaches full-time at The Academy at Charlemont.
Bullets into Bells 