About

Heather Lee Schroeder is a writer and poet who teaches at Pellissippi State Community College in Knoxville, Tennessee. Her nonfiction book A Reader’s Guide to Marjane Satrapi’s ‘Persepolis’ was released by Enslow Publishing in January 2010. Her fiction, poetry and essays have appeared in Southern Indiana Review, bornmagazine.com, Iron Horse Literary Review, Wisconsin People and Ideas, Beloit Fiction Journal, The Virginia Quarterly Review (www.vqronline.org), and The Cream City Review.

Heather received her MFA (emphasis in fiction writing) from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in art history from Beloit College in Beloit, Wisconsin. She was born and raised in the Upper Midwest generally and southern Wisconsin/northern Illinois specifically. She lived in Madison, Wisconsin for 14 years where she worked as an editor and writer for The Capital Times and Cheese Market News.

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Acts of Faith

Fascists made recourse to castor oil, the cudgel (manganello), devastations, and fires.— Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi

The snap of bullet against bone woke us
from the clamp of feverish siesta,
our limbs tangled, burning.
Me, buttoning my dress
when they crossed the threshold—
their boots shiny, shirts wet.

Now, an unfastened shutter scrapes
against tile, measures time.
Their razor rasps and pools my hair
in bundles beneath the stool—
my skull a dog’s pale belly.

This, my auto-da-fé: their step
over your broken legs, the mouth
of a gallon jug forced between my teeth,
the sweep of castor oil in my throat,
and the memory of your forearm—
a map of vein and muscle under my hand.

~Heather Lee Schroeder