Futility and Other Sins by Lauren Scharhag

I have tasted defeat so many times
I can tell you what wine to pair with it.
I have felt futility carve into me
its Sisyphean groove.
I have glimpsed bitterness myopically,
like a pair of broken reading glasses
at the end of the world.
Rejection is the dominatrix that stings me
and keeps me coming back for more.
I am not the friend to the downtrodden
I had aspired to be in youth.
I have never been the rescuer
of a single marooned sea star, even
when the opportunity presented itself,
but stood instead on the desolate shore,
as if in a doorway,
awaiting grace or ubuntu to show up
and drag me from my hermitage.
I’ve wrung every drop from solitude
as I’d wring the juice from a prickly pear,
stranded, parched, along the Devil’s Highway.
I cling to apathy the way a passenger
clings to the drop-down oxygen mask
as the jet spirals to the ground,
believing, with a sort of holy urgency,
that I must help me before I help anyone else,
that I cannot pour from an empty cup.
I realize I, too, am a gasping starfish,
a distressed passenger at the mercy of gravity.

Lauren Scharhag is the author of fourteen books, including Requiem for a Robot Dog (Cajun Mutt Press) and Languages, First and Last (Cyberwit Press). Her work has appeared in over 100 literary venues around the world. Recent honors include the Seamus Burns Creative Writing Prize, two Best of the Net nominations, and acceptance into the 2021 Antarctic Poetry Exhibition. She lives in Kansas City, MO. To learn more about her work, visit: www.laurenscharhag.blogspot.com