by Luz Castaneda
Waiting Period
My uterus walks into a high school.
Wait.
My uterus walks into a store.
Wait.
My uterus walks into a salon.
Wait.
My uterus walks onto a college campus,
Into a synagogue,
A nightclub,
An elementary school.
A hotel overseeing a concert,
A movie theatre
A
A
A
Wait.
My uterus drives three hours across state lines
so it can walk into a Planned Parenthood,
survives a forced transvaginal ultrasound, which I look at,
grainy black and white screen, small black dot center,
waiting period of seventy-two hours.
While a man in Georgia purchases a gun
the same day he murders eight people.
Wait.
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. 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.
Luz Castaneda was born in Brazil to Brazilian and Spanish parents. Since 2014, she has been living and working as an artist in NYC. She is a self-taught artist, a biologist, Ph.D. in Genetics, educator and researcher in the sacred language of nature. Her research and artwork are a combination of her artistic soul and scientific mind. Her art has been exhibited in multiple galleries in the United States and Brazil. www.luzcastaneda.com.