A Food Court in Hell is now available!

 

Cover art by Cory Kirby

A Food Court in Hell is here! Grab a copy on Amazon, or you can purchase copies directly from me, $15.99 + shipping (US domestic only). 

If we're friends on Facebook, please message me there, otherwise my email is laurenscharhag@gmail.com. 

I also still have copies of some of my other books - I will do two for $20 + shipping. (Other titles I still have copies of include West Side Girl & Other Poems, Requiem for a Robot Dog, Languages First and Last, as well as my short story collection, Screaming Intensifies.) 

One of the poem in this book, "Soulbirds and Firefoxes," just received an honorable mention in Marrow Magazine's 2025 Halloween contest, and "Little Brown Changeling" was the 2024 Rhysling Award winner in the long-form category. 

If anyone is interested in reviewing this book, please let me know - I am happy to provide digital copies to reviewers. 

SYNOPSIS

A Food Court in Hell contains poems for the slow-motion apocalypse. With the stars as not-so-silent witnesses, awareness and resignation vie with hope, rumination, and celebration. These poems are a letter to the universe, a reminder that this world is worth saving. Herein, mythology and fairy tales, art and artifacts, natural and manmade wonders, pop culture and mysticism all converge, on the teetering edge of the dying American empire.

SAMPLE POEM

Another poem about the moon

I watched A Trip to the Moon. They knew

firing a bullet-shaped rocket to the moon

wouldn’t get us there. They knew there probably

wasn’t snow on the moon. They knew

mushrooms probably didn’t grow

in the caverns on the moon.

They knew there were probably no moon people.

Now, more than half a century since the moon’s mysteries

have been dispelled, it sits, a particularly unscenic rock,

like a dingy Nixon-era tourist attraction somewhere

in Nebraska, covered in footprints and fading flags.

But we also know now that the moon is the result

of a collision between Earth and some other planet,

dust of our dust, shard of our shard, and from here,

the winter moon is still bright and silver, and the

summer moon is warm and golden,

and still, we photograph it, and we paint it,

and we conjure gods from it, and across 1,000 miles

you and I text each other to ask,

Have you seen the moon tonight?

And even when you say, No, it’s overcast here,

we can still, for a moment, walk together

with the Selenites

through lunar snowfall.