Bio: Lauren Scharhag (she/her) is an award-winning author of fiction and poetry, and a senior editor at Gleam. Her latest poetry collection, Midnight Glossolalia (with Scott Ferry and Lillian Necakov), is now available from Meat for Tea Press. She lives in Kansas City, MO. https://linktr.ee/laurenscharhag
Curandera
As a young girl, my grandmother, always a hellraiser,
had been allowed to drop out of school. To keep her from being idle,
she was charged with caring for her dying grandmother, a curandera.
Eventually, every healer meets the disease they cannot cure.
No amount of tronadora or nopal could save her,
diabetes in the days when it was just a matter of time,
the insulin treatments too new, too imprecise, and too many patients
still ended up blind, with lost limbs, renal failure.
My grandmother told me how she watched
her grandmother bloat and turn black.
Forty years later, Grandma was still a hellraiser,
and the bedroom where she’d first witnessed death had long-since
been converted into storage: my uncle's old 8-tracks, his drum kit,
an avocado green dresser, encyclopedias from 1970, a broken antenna,
a rain lamp with a nude woman in its circle of ferns and filaments,
a bed for guests, not that there were ever any guests—
none that I could see, anyway. Grandma always claimed the room
was haunted by the ghost of her grandmother. For what it’s worth,
my cousins and I used to play in that room all the time,
and I never got any vibes. This is not to say that I haven't seen the ghost
of my grandmother’s grandmother, (in dreams, in visions, at Day of the Dead)
or that I think my grandmother was lying because I can see
how a ghost might choose who they appear to and when,
and I can see how that room meant something different to each of us,
and I, neither healer nor hellraiser, was with my grandmother
when she died of renal failure, missing a hand. As I clean the blood
from her ring, a ring I gave her, I try to grasp something, some truth
about full circles, about points of entry and departure, about the beads of us
like oil sliding down filament, but all I find is the shiny polyester of an old
bedspread, yellow petals of hierba de San Pedro. A throat full of must.
Prick your finger on a prickly pear and check your glucose levels.
If anyone knows about the nature of transience, it’s immigrants.
This turnstile only spins one way. Still, I grope for whatever
space it leads to. I grope with a hand that’s already a ghost.
***
Overlook
I don’t come from a scenic place
my landlocked city hemmed in by steel and cement
that’s not a complaint
I like short commutes and good restaurants
but it makes the sycamore shading my balcony
all the more precious
the branches and seedpods it tosses on the boards
an augury of love
something I want to take into myself
and disappear into
my winged samaras’ spiralwhisper a hymn
yes even here horned owls woodpeckers
red foxes racoons memory of buffalo
yes even here bright quartz in the creek beds
a bluebird singing from a wire
and in city parks little brown bats vie
with streetlamps for twilight's indigo acres.
***
Catharsis
before this release you must lie
down among the poison white baneberry
withstand its many-eyed gaze passing
judgment swing the thurible’s smoldering
golden cage until frankincense touches
each individual space and makes it holy
stoke cleansing wildfires California
is burning and we stand together bearing
witness to the scalding sunset root-like
fingers scrabbling madly for the diminishing
groundwater talk of resurrecting the extinct
apex predator kiss the stinger of each bee then
and only then might we meet with the
penultimate catharsis as rapture a sort
of ecstasy like being squeezed through
the eye of a needle.
***
