Exclusive: Western Voices, 2020: Edited by Scott Thomas Outlar
Bio: Lauren Scharhag
is the author of thirteen books, including Requiem for a Robot
Dog (Cajun Mutt Press) and Languages, First and Last (Cyberwit
Press). Her work has appeared in over 100 literary venues around the world.
Recent honors include the Seamus Burns Creative Writing Prize and two Best of
the Net nominations. She lives in Kansas City, MO. To learn more
about her work, visit: www.laurenscharhag.blogspot.com
Ay de Mi
In the version my abuela told me,
she had taken a lover,
or maybe she was a widow,
on the prowl for a new husband.
In either case,
she had to get rid of her children
to please a man.
This we understood.
We knew about our mothers and their
boyfriends.
Even the ones that become
step-fathers
could never really see us as theirs.
Be good, or La Llorona will get you.
We could imagine it all so easily,
our little barrio by the river.
In every version,
there is always a body of water,
there is always a drowning.
This we understood as well.
Our grandfathers had crossed a
river;
that’s why they called us wetbacks.
We understood the borders
between life and not-life,
how they must be drawn
in water and breath.
Now, her restless spirit
searches endlessly
for children, calling,
¿D├│nde est├бn mis hijos?
When modern Medeas made the news,
we knew them for what they were.
Then one night, I heard it, too,
the crying.
Terrified, I hid under the covers.
My mother told me, It’s just a
story,
and the sound you heard—
it was just mourning doves.
But mourning doves don’t sing at
night.
If you hear La Llorona, run the
other way.
Later, I realized I must have heard
a real woman crying,
those old houses built
within arm’s length of each other,
open windows in the summer meant
we could hear everything
going on next door
and I didn’t know a single woman
on the block
that didn’t have
a reason to weep.
In some versions,
it was an act of mercy.
She’d rather see her children dead
than destitute,
bereft of love.
Now that I am a woman
who has shed her share of tears,
I understand the wandering fog,
and making choices each
more damned
than the last.
Daybreak
Sometimes,
the shaman’s path
is air.
I aspire to feathers
and hollow bones,
an appetite for grubs.
Watch for my wings
at daybreak,
when I depart this earth
and sing.
The
Unseeing
We see only the bills that need to
be paid.
We are consumed with shopping lists
and topping off fuel tanks.
At best, we shut off the lights.
At best, we turn off the tap when we
brush our teeth.
We are concerned with the lakes
where we summer,
with the diminishing songbirds that
once
graced our backyard feeders,
with the sea turtles we saw once at
an aquarium,
with the deer, suddenly homeless,
crashing through our bay windows
in a violent reversal of life,
afterbirth of blood and glass.
It’s hard to imagine the landfills
that are kept
well away from our neighborhoods,
the slow boats to China laden with
waste
now being marked return to sender.
Most of us have seen more ivory
in our lifetime than elephants,
so how do we conceptualize a glacier,
the groan of a cracking ice shelf?
Most of us will never stand on the
thing
that could drown the world,
or even know that the pitcher has
been tipped.
The frogs can’t see the slow boil or
the grasshopper summer’s end.
To everyone, their way of life is
just forever.
Would we understand better if you
told us
that Sunday has been cancelled,
that there will be no more Easter
egg hunts?
Would we understand what it means to
say
this is the death cabinet and we
just keep
adding species to it? Somewhere, the
last
giraffe does not know it is the last
giraffe.
Somewhere, the last unseeing man
will come
to his epiphany.
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