TWO POEMS

by Lauren Scharhag

 

GIRL WITH A GUN
after Louisiana Zombie Afternoon, by Jenn Zed

Of course it would happen here. Nobody was surprised
when the dead came for Louisiana. We are known
for our strange history, for saints and voodoo,
for vampires and delta blues (the best music
to die by), for jazz funerals (the best music
to waltz into heaven by), and for burying our departed
in cement bone boxes to escape the water
that’s constantly threatening to suck us under,
the green Gulf that sits higher than our greatest city.
We are known for the hurricanes, for the thousands
lost in the flood. We are known for the bayous and
the wet savannahs, where the pelicans and egrets
make their roosts, where the tree frogs sing
to the night and the delicate orchids thrive
on dark alluvium and rot. Where the black mold
overtakes the walls and the noxious kudzu
continues to encroach with its violet blooms.
Where the gators and the hogs and the black bears
and the painters and the canebreaks and the pinesnakes
and the fire ants and the brown recluse all wait
for their opportunity to gore and gut you. Where the ripe
and the rancid live cheek-and-jowl. Where the living
take and take, and we have always known that the dead
would come to cash in someday. But here, we have also
the coyote and the turkey vulture. We have the humble
carrion beetle. We have a girl with a gun, who is
an orchid in knee socks, who is a life-bomb
waiting to go off. We are on your trail.
Your stench is unmistakable.

PARISIAN PHOENIX, BY WAY OF TEXAS

You write to me from death row that you
are hungry for material.
Anything will do, you say,
junk mail, newspaper clippings,
scratch paper, anything
that can be incorporated into your art,
anything to feather your concrete nest.
I understand this, how all artists
are essentially magpies at heart,
gathering shiny things and squirreling them away
as we consider the perfect setting for them,
as we consider how to make the scavenged
into something wholly new.
I select greeting cards with gems and googly eyes,
with glitter and bright colors.
I send fine stationary and postcards.
I fish discarded scrapbooking paper from a bin
with kitschy French designs:
loopy script saying l’amour, chocolat,
the Eiffel Tower, Notre Dame.
I send it to you anyway and you
fold a sheet of it into three paper cranes
and burn them around the edges.
You send them to another pen pal in Paris,
who ventures down to the Île de la Cité,
braving the lead dust to photograph himself
holding them, as if in offering,
as if about to let them fly,
before the doors
of the fire-damaged cathedral.
I wonder if you meant for there to be
a phoenix for each of us,
widely separated by distance and
varying degrees of freedom,
by varying degrees of emergence,
united by this burning need to rise
from our ashen chrysalis and say,
“I was here the year Notre Dame burned,
I was still here, and on a plume
of toxic chemicals, I shall be undone,
only to return.”

Lauren Scharhag is the author of twelve books, including Requiem for a Robot Dog (Cajun Mutt Press) and High Water Lines (Prolific 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