Cursed Images
an ekphrastic poem, of a sort
Old man in a wood-panelled room with crates of
tomatoes.
Display tables made of two-by-fours and oil
drums.
Not cursed like Cain or King Tut’s tomb;
not cursed like a thespian dooming himself
by uttering the name of the Scottish play.
Nor is it that you, viewer, are the one who’s cursed
for looking upon them,
like Ham beholding his father’s shame.
A crude cross covered in black garbage bags.
Crucified to it a naked Barbie.
It’s that there are places – moments –
in this world that are cursed.
Sometimes, they are only a few feet wide,
an anomaly of physics,
like Santa Cruz’s Mystery Spot,
where gravity and perspective seem to bend
in the uncanny hush of redwoods.
They’re there for just an instant,
then gone again.
A woman at a kitchen counter slicing salami
with an old Windows XP disc.
The internet, like all communities,
has spawned its own lore,
spoken in the language it knows best:
let us bring you disquiet in pixels.
A herd of sheep at dusk, beneath an orange and
charcoal sky.
Dozens of pairs of glowing eyes bore into you.
The unease that you crave.
All nightmares are composed of fragments
of real life. Your mind gives them
back to you, off-kilter. Why do we seek it out?
Oh, we like novelty. We like sensation.
A man wearing a hollowed-out koala bear plushie
as a mask, casually sipping beer through a straw,
Violent content teaches us about violence.
It’s a defence mechanism.
Feeling creeped out, that’s just the body’s response
to something ambiguous, when something’s
not quite right and you can’t put your finger
on why. The mind hovers, unable to light.
Friend or foe? Threat, or not a threat?
Real or unreal?
A crowd of grey aliens.
There’s a woman standing behind them for scale.
They’re just children in costumes—aren’t they?
Existential horror. Cosmic horror.
A place where other universes bleed
into this one, or a bend in the U-joint
between heaven and hell, and it’s
so very hard to tell sometimes
what is real.
Night cam. A child, barefoot,
wearing a nightgown,
standing with two deer,
in the middle of a forest.
Too still. They might be angels
or ghosts or demons.
Monsieur Daguerre who first captured
the Boulevard du Temple
in copper and silver and iodine
could never have imagined this:
our reality now composed of images.
Pics or it didn’t happen. We live
in images. We feed on images.
1.2 trillion digital photos will be taken this year.
More photos taken every two minutes
than there were taken in the entirety
of the 18th century. Of course some pictures
would take on a life of their own.
A life means a personality.
Not all personalities are friendly.
A dank basement with a table, dolls arranged
around it in the manner of The Last Supper.
Coins scattered on the table top.
You would think they were 30 pieces of silver
but they’re not. Just plain old Lincoln pennies,
dull with tarnish.
Some Native Americans and Aborigines
still refuse to be photographed.
The Kayapos of the Amazon call photography
akaron kaba, “to steal a soul.”
The Amish believe photos are graven images.
We give our souls every day
for selfies and profile shots.
We make of ourselves graven images.
A shopping mall fountain geysers what,
at first glance, appears to be blood.
Water dyed blood-red.
Undoubtedly a St. Valentine’s Day miscalculation,
a celebration of a sports team with red jerseys.
Or blood. It could be blood.
They say you photograph anything
that you can’t bear to lose.
Time is the fire in which we burn
and photographs are our way
of rushing back into the flames
to salvage our keepsakes.
A scar is also a keepsake.
Our brains cling to the hurt.
Nothing teaches like a hurt.
Masochism a necessity.
A suburban lawn overrun by badgers.
The world is wrong. It’s nice to know
that no, we’re not crazy.
It’s really, really wrong.
In a time of Photoshop and filters
and deep fakes, this unblinking ugliness
is almost a comfort.
Art used to hold a mirror up to society.
Now, we live inside that mirror.
Dysfunctional furniture. Odd food combinations.
Dolls and mannequins. Masks and costumes.
Eerie hallways. Dark and empty rooms.
A necklace of human teeth.
Crepuscular creatures. Uncanny faces
captured by front door cams.
What is wrong. What is wrong. What is wrong.
We are. We are. We are.
We are wrong. And we juxtapose.
And we are absurd. And we squirm.
A staircase in the middle of a forest
that has no business being
in the middle of a forest.
Not a foundation stone nor any other
parts of a building in sight.
Just stairs. Leading up to nowhere.
Leaves collecting in the risers.
Except we are the slayer of our brother,
the brazen archaeologist disturbing
the pharaoh’s eternal rest. Except we are
Macbeth, Macbeth, Macbeth,
rubbernecking at Noah’s drunken shenanigans.
An old black and white photo,
1960s Butterick dresses and Formica.
Two nice-looking ladies having lunch with a nun.
The nun’s eyes a diabolical flash.
We are the technology the way
the creator is us,
which means God is also
dirt and God is also
cursed
with us.
Of a Feather
for Gabi Mann
Myth, fable, folklore, legend—
this is how they’re born,
with an unusual child,
a connection to the animal world.
It can still happen, even in our time.
The crow was the only creature
who survived the Great Flood,
the coming of the third age of man.
It started with an accident,
a messy pre-schooler, a bit of dropped food.
Then she began to share with them,
morsels from her lunchbox
on the way to the bus stop.
In a pinch, may our wits serve us,
the way a few dropped pebbles in a pitcher
becomes an epiphany, and the thirsty crow
drinks.
Then her back yard became a shrine,
offerings of water and peanuts,
like the Temple of the Rats in Rajasthan,
feeding creatures that some call pests
and some call mischief, some call God
and some call darkness.
This is the story of how the crow’s rainbow
feathers
turned black, and his once-beautiful voice
went hoarse forever.
Grateful, the crows bring baubles,
which she catalogues, as if it were a royal treasury:
here is the heart-shaped button of pearl,
here is half a friendship charm,
here are screws and bits of metal,
here are Legos and marbles,
here are the river-polished courtship stones.
It is said that the spirit of King Arthur lives
on
in the form of a crow.
The birds watch her watching them.
They return a lost camera lens,
but only after washing it first
in the bird bath. I wonder if she feels
protected, even as she protects them,
a princess with her loyal guard.
Once upon a time, there was a girl
who loved crows, and they loved her.
Which begs the question,
are they her power animal or
is she theirs? Do the crows tell,
amongst themselves, the tale
of a hungry murder and
a beneficent human child,
or perhaps the coming of a great crow,
born in the guise of a maiden?
The girl didn’t know it,
but the crows’ gifts would eventually
weave a spell that would turn her back
into her true form.
Now the neighbours complain about the mess,
about clogged gutters and drainpipes,
the accumulation of feathers and droppings
and peanut shells. The magical and
the mundane have always had
so little tolerance for one another.
I hope she is learning their language.
I hope she is already weaving the tale
she will leave behind.
One day, she would have to choose.
Walkers between worlds eventually
must settle, and what girl doesn’t dream
of flight, of prophecy,
of spreading her wings
and departing this world for home?
In time, the crow pierces us all.
Service
Dogs
inspired
by Healing Paws for Warriors
You
hear stories about dogs
who’ve
been through horrific ordeals:
fighting
rings, hoarders, puppy mills,
or
just plain old neglect,
chained
in yards,
discarded
on roadsides;
brought
to the shelter
starving,
sick, injured,
heart
full of worms,
hide full
of ticks.
Survival
doesn’t seem possible,
until
it does.
Survival
isn’t always the hardest part.
Even
after the body heals,
there
is still the spirit
to
contend with.
Some
take longer
to
stop cringing,
to
stop snarling and snapping,
to accept
kindness.
Eventually,
they
seem to forget.
Teach
me, dog, to forget.
Teach
me to live
in the
moment,
and
not
in the
echoes
of
war.
Years
after
I’ve
taken off my dog tags,
I
still cringe,
I
still snarl and snap.
We are
both wanderers
in
from the desert,
land
of Old Mother Bowwow,
lady
of the dogs,
licker
of wounds.
Teach
us how to live
with
water and grass,
how to
live with soft voices
and
gentle hands.
Somehow,
with wagging tail
and
lolling tongue,
you
bear the weight
of our
combined brokenness.
I
almost envy your duty
which
began the moment
you
licked
my hand.
The Holy Sweet
For over 300 years,
in a secret temple kitchen
in Andhra Pradesh,
they have made
this humble confection:
chickpea flour, clarified butter,
sugar, cashew nuts,
raisins and cardamom.
The sacred tirupati laddu,
offering to Venkateswara.
To make it is both an honour
and a responsibility
awarded only to a few
select cooks. The recipe,
like Coca-Cola or KFC’s
eleven herbs and spices,
is top secret. When freshly made,
it should weigh exactly
178 grams. As it cools, it reduces
to 174. Such precision,
such reverence. To partake,
one must undertake a pilgrimage.
Only a few rupees, about 15 cents apiece,
limit three per customer.
Over 300,000 a day served,
a gamut of high-tech coupons
with facial recognition,
of long lines made up
of the faithful or merely
the famished. It is one of the few
products of the world that merits
a GI tag, like champagne
or Darjeeling tea.
Accept no substitutes.
Make your offering
first to the deity,
then you may consume it.
If you want to taste
what God tastes,
if you want to have
your sins destroyed,
you must prove
yourself worthy.
The Dead Watch
In my suburban house, in my
suburban neighbourhood, beige facade,
place without memory, I build
a Day of the Dead altar in my room.
I am 14, struggling to connect
to my roots. I set out old photos,
my grandfather's broken pocket watch,
fragrant coffee and copal, a potted marigold.
It is a pale imitation. I am a pale imitation.
Sometime after midnight, I fall asleep.
In my dreams, the watch ticks
and the dead awaken.
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
No comments:
Post a Comment