Lauren Scharhag - Ay di Me (United States)

from #BreakTheBias by Various

	/

Buy the Full Digital Album

about

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 200 literary venues around the world. Recent honors include the Seamus Burns Creative Writing Prize, and multiple Best of the Net, Pushcart Prize and Rhysling Award nominations. She lives in Kansas City, Missouri, USA.

Author blog: laurenscharhag.blogspot.com
Twitter and Instagram: @laurenscharhag
Facebook: www.facebook.com/laurenscharhag

lyrics

AY DE MI

In the version my abuela told me,
she had taken a lover,
or maybe she was a widow,
on the prowl for a new husband.
In either case,
she had to get rid of her children
to please a man.
This we understood.
We knew about our mothers and their boyfriends.
Even the ones that became step-fathers
could never really see us as theirs.

Be good, or La Llorona will get you.

We could imagine it all so easily,
our little barrio by the river.
In every version,
there is always a body of water,
there is always a drowning.
This we understood as well.
Our grandfathers had crossed a river;
that’s why they called us wetbacks.
We understood the borders
between life and not-life,
how they must be drawn
in water and breath.

Now, her restless spirit
searches endlessly
for children, calling,

¿Dónde están mis hijos?

When modern Medeas made the news,
we knew them for what they were.
Then one night, I heard it, too,
the crying.
Terrified, I hid under the covers.
My mother told me, It’s just a story,
and the sound you heard—
it was just mourning doves.
But mourning doves don’t sing at night.

If you hear La Llorona, run the other way.

Later, I realized I must have heard
a real woman crying,
those old houses built
within arm’s length of each other,
open windows in the summer meant
we could hear everything
going on next door
and I didn’t know a single woman
on the block
that didn’t have
a reason to weep.

In some versions,
it was an act of mercy.
She’d rather see her children dead
than destitute,
bereft of love.

Now that I am a woman
who has shed her share of tears,
I understand the wandering fog,
and making choices each
more damned
than the last.