The Wardrobe's Best Dressed: Requiem for a Robot Dog by Lauren Scharhag

This selection, chosen by guest curator Heather Leigh, is from Requiem for a Robot Dog by Lauren Scharhag, released by Cajun Mutt Press in 2019.

Therapy

I have yet
to find a psychiatrist
that likes me.
Writers don’t need
an excuse
to be introspective.
I bring him
my night terrors.
I wallow on his
soft leather couch.
I try his method
of using
my five senses
to quell panic,
but I have 101
and live too much
through my nostrils
and nerves as it is.
There’s nothing new
under the sun,
including and perhaps
especially
my problems.
He says,
Tell me about your mother.
I tell him,
I don’t think
my mother is the problem,
though I have had
many of them.
I think God
is the problem.
He says, Talk to a priest, then.
He says, I don’t believe in God.
I say, Now
we’re getting somewhere.

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.

Heather Leigh is a queer, disabled writer and editor who has been working within Chicago’s publishing world for more than twenty years, editing poetry for the likes of Curbside Splendor and reading prose and poetry for Uncanny Magazine. She has recently began to focus on her own publication goals between semesters teaching English, writing, reading, and journalism at various midwestern community colleges. She is a three-time SAFTA fellowship recipient, a multiple resident of Firefly Farms, and most recently had a speculative horror story published in Bloodlet, an anthology by CultureCult Press. She lives in Chicago with a retired cage-fighting poet, two rescue cats names after Buffy watchers, enjoying life with the family that caught her by surprise.