Five Poems
by Lauren Scharhag
Things My Uncles Made in Prison
Two out of three sons spent most of their lives in prison.
Both former altar boys, they were more devout
when they were inside; they talked to their mother more,
making collect calls, and quoting scripture in their letters,
which she kept in a drawer along with a green plastic rosary,
yet another carceral memento, and Polaroid portraits of them
in their prison blues, taken by inmate photographers.
I think of their hands, holding the pen, fingering the beads,
growing old before their time, fashioning objects
that they intended to set loose, like doves at a funeral.
The gifts arrived, packed carefully in newspaper and cardboard,
metal folk art made with old horseshoes, bolts, and washers;
drawings of Christ, ballpoint on yellow wide-rule;
wooden picture frames carved with hearts;
pendants on leather cords; a lighter case because
she still smoked Kools; and a music box shaped like a piano,
its interior lined in mauve velvet. She kept the latter
on top of her dresser. Its steel and brass movement
played a tune I can’t remember.
Two Inches
My mother went to the doctor.
He told her she’s lost 2 inches off her height.
She’s always been a petite lady, and nearing 70 now.
2 inches doesn't seem so very much against the span of years.
2 inches seems immense against the span of years.
Yes, it’s a large paperclip, a sewing needle, a golf tee.
Yes, it’s the diameter of a billiard ball.
But her high heels used to be higher than 2 inches.
I remember the many pairs: versatile black pumps,
knee-high leather boots, bright red stilettos,
the clear Lucite open-toes we called her Cinderella slippers,
the strappy silver pair I borrowed for prom.
Now she wears flats.
Her hair used to be teased higher than 2 inches,
so many afternoons spent in beauty parlors
with a magazine and a pink helmet of perm rods,
so many mornings in front of the bathroom mirror
with a set of hot rollers, a hair pick, curling irons,
and cans of Aqua Net.
Now she has the obligatory older women’s haircut:
short, sensible.
The dangly earrings that swept her shoulders,
longer than 2 inches.
The cigarettes she still smokes, 4 inches.
She was 26 when she had me.
I am already so much older than she was when she had me.
We pass through the days like a funnel, not realizing
how it gets smaller and smaller towards the end.
The average vagina is 3-7 inches deep.
It stretches to accommodate a baby.
Women gain anywhere from 10 to 40 pounds during pregnancy.
Breasts rise and flatten like topographic events.
We are small and large at the same time.
We ping-pong back and forth like Alice
at an All You Can Eat Me buffet.
She put me on my first diet when I was 8,
and now, she wonders why I hate this body so much,
how hard I work to lose 2 inches off my waistline.
When they teach us we should always make ourselves smaller,
this is not what they meant.
We know that’s not what they meant.
But notches on a ruler, notches on a belt.
It all starts to look the same.
When we die, they say we lose 21 grams,
an even tinier unit of measurement.
What is 2 inches of soul?
What is the infinite?
The years whittling us down
until 2 inches is a crack you can fall through,
until 2 inches is an abyss
we’re gaping at each other across.
Lucy’s Last Days
Renal failure, the vet said.
A condition we knew too well—
that you knew too well.
You don’t really get something like that
unless you’ve gone through it,
and I’d only gone through it second-hand.
You knew what it felt like to live at the mercy
of tubes and needles.
When you got your transplant,
we thought we were done—or at least,
granted a respite of many, many years.
But now, it’s dialysis all over again,
the feline equivalent:
subcutaneous fluids for hydration
and to flush waste products from her blood.
The vet tech shows us how,
but we just don’t have the heart to do it,
to grab the scruff of her neck and jab the needle in.
So we tried taking her to the vet every day,
45 minutes both ways,
and she already hated car rides.
The treatments were supposed to make her feel better,
but they never seemed to.
She continued to barf and pee everywhere,
especially in our bed,
at least twice while we were in it,
necessitating 2 a.m. sheet changes.
Our bed had always been her favorite place.
It got to the point where we got an old blanket
to use as a protective cover,
just as we once bought only cheap comforters
that could be thrown in the wash
from where you vomited or dribbled dialysate.
I kept asking, Don’t you think it’s time?
And you kept saying, I can’t. I just can’t yet.
I guess letting her go
felt like some kind of defeat to you;
where you didn’t give in before
to the thing that could have killed you,
now you find you have to give up
a little piece of yourself after all,
that we are left once again
with unused needles and bags of fluid,
along with an empty cat tree.
Flores
When Abuela used to tell me about Mexico, she would
always talk about the flowers. On Avenida Tulum, I am
just another tourist browsing the fruit stands and strip malls,
but with every blossom I see, I hear her voice: dahlias
and passion flowers, birds of paradise, pineapple sage,
laelia orchids, frangipani, beds of agave, even the clusters
of seagrape on the shore whisper, Remember me.
When I return to tallgrass prairie and feed corn, when
the August sun has scorched the land to straw and dust,
I do not forget, even as I struggle to reconcile that to this,
her humble garden of tomato plants, the invasive purple
trumpet vines and morning glories overtaking the chain link fence,
the ragged robin roses swallowing the porch. Not even a lawn,
but a tangle of ground ivy, foxtail, and dandelions. How she
regretted having the old elm tree cut down, robbing the yard
of shade. The alley cats she used to feed sunning themselves
on the patio. Descendants of those cats roam here still, rolling
in the same river loam where we scattered her ashes.
When the monarch butterflies drift through our bluffs and
bottomlands on their way down to Michoacán, their wings
the color of marigolds, the flowers of the dead, surely they
carry some of this with them, binding place to place, flood plain
to flood plain. They carry her with them. She has become
a part of this land, this place of sunflowers and butterfly
milkweed and white hawthorn blossoms, and they carry her,
on flame-colored wings, home to Zamora.
motley
we saw him at a comedy club
he'd starred in a film that was popular
when we were kids
and while his set was about other stuff
he still humored us and did the funny voice
said the line
if he had any other good jokes I couldn't tell you
I only remember the line
because like everyone else in the audience
that's really what I'd come to hear
and when he was wrapping up
he mentioned he was also a visual artist
and after the applause died down
he went offstage and sat at a table
beside the paintings he'd brought to sell
his expression demeanor everything different
a whole other person
not the 80s one-hit wonder
nor the working comedian in a frayed sports coat
nor even an actor
but the real him
a galaxy of abstract colors
and I was one of maybe three people
who stopped to look mostly to be polite
I remember one piece a black and white checkerboard pattern
strewn with spheres that might have been marbles
or might have been planets
and I thought again of 1988 and how this man
was a time traveler
because I swear I had a Trapper Keeper
with that same design
and I understand how the audience
wants to keep you in one lane
and all you want to do is become a pinball
unstuck from the continuum
pinging between actor comedian artist
all none you
and no doubt a multitude of selves no ticket will ever
buy us admission to
BIO: Lauren Scharhag (she/her) is an award-winning author of fiction and poetry and a senior editor at Gleam. Her latest poetry collection, Moonlight and Monsters, is now available from Gnashing Teeth Publishing. A short story collection, Screaming Intensifies, is forthcoming from Whiskey City Press. She lives in Kansas City, MO. https://linktr.ee/laurenscharhag