Bio: Lauren Scharhag (she/her) is an associate editor for GLEAM: Journal of the Cadralor, and 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 150 literary venues around the world. Recent honors include the Seamus Burns Creative Writing Prize and multiple Best of the Net and Pushcart Prize nominations. She lives in Kansas City, MO. To learn more about her work, visit: www.laurenscharhag.blogspot.com
Trap, Neuter, Release
Kitten season and volunteers
scour abandoned lots and alleyways,
get hot tips on hoarders,
armed with traps and bits of food
they lure out ferals, confronting
fleas, worms, infections,
torn ears, kittens having kittens,
get them to vets for snip and release,
for kitty hysterectomies,
for compassionate euthanasia,
incorrigibles returned with a
notched ear
to keep on scrapping in colonies,
to keep on eating garbage and
dodging cars,
or out to the country where barns
offer
happy hunting grounds that lead
straight into the jaws of a coyote.
Meanwhile, foster homes overcrowd
with blind newborns, simulated mamas
providing warmth to the bottle-fed.
If they can achieve fighting weight
there’s a chance someone will
take them in. Felines, loved too
much
or not enough, who brought you in
from the wilderness to guard the
hulls
and the grain? Who belled you,
plucked your claws and taught you
to piss in a box? Who invites you
to eat canned p├вt├й and lounge on mats
in the sun, and bat at yarn?
Are we symbionts? This price is steep
to keep getting drawn back
to bowls of kibble set out on back steps,
and blankets, and chin scritches,
and catnip. You take your revenge out
on my curtains. Toxoplasmosis.
The Ice Cream Churn
You associate your grandfather
with the wooden churn
the way you associate him
with books and overalls
and a drill-sergeant temper,
flash of cane, rattan rapping
its tattoo on your skull if you didn’t
change the channel fast enough
to spare his eyes the offending
colored person on-screen. Slave-owning
a poison in the blood that four generations
still hasn’t washed out. Meandering
north and west, but circling back
to visit his father’s mammy
in the hills of Old Dominion.
The way his pockets rattled with change
from working laundromats.
He introduced you to
Old Mother West Wind,
and in the summers, he made
ice cream in the shade
of the back porch and let you
pour in the rock salt. Surely
your grandmother must have
scalded the can and the dasher,
surely it was her bottle of vanilla,
but he mixed the milk and sugar,
layered in the ice, turned the crank
until his arm met resistance.
He wiped away salt water
beading the top. He lifted out
the metal quart and served it.
Plain, of course.
Solace
My favorite apartment was
by Cathedral Square,
the church founded in 1835,
a log cabin overlooking the river.
Its first parishioners would have been
farmers and traders,
maybe a fur trapper or two,
though they don’t strike me
as the praying type.
Now, its golden steeple
presides over a bustling downtown.
How I loved awakening to its great bells,
lauds and vespers underscored by light;
the tower that’s burnished at sunset
glints at dawn. I used to think
that I was not worthy
to receive such solace,
that beginnings and endings do not
have to be so dreadful.
Frank wisdom and humanity-- a lovely sense of history combined with the personal tone.
ReplyDeleteThank you, Dustin!
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