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Companion Animals
Why I Respect the Dog
The dog weighs twelve pounds / and uses them as she pleases. / The king-size bed is not big enough. / Sleep enabler, stretch-monger, / when she wants to be touched, / she offers up the narrow white arc / of her belly. When a loud face / crowds her, she growls. Or, depending / on the weather, the time, the face, /she doesn’t.
July 2024Canada Day
The drive from Homer, Alaska, to Casper, Wyoming, is more than three thousand miles, much of it on winding two-lane highways where moose and bears slip from the underbrush and stand in the road. It had already been a rough trip.
July 2024
My Father Not the Sky
My dad used to wake us up at 5 AM on Sundays / with the vacuum cleaner, saying, Get out of bed, / the day is wasting, and then he’d be asleep on the couch // by nine, just as the sun began to lift its head / over the houses.
June 2024White Face, Black Eyes
In the hotter months Cactus Country was less a vacation campground and more a land of lost and wandering souls. Like most everyone else who moved to the park during that time, Dave didn’t know how long he would stay or where he would go next.
May 2024
In the Freezer
she kept pig haunches, / the shoulder joints of cows, / buffalo neck and guts, / all stuck to the ziplock bags. / If anyone ever asked, / Mother simply laughed.
May 2024When I Come to Get My Things
I am amazed at how much of my shit I left / with her, and to see it piled in her hallway / clears space in me for what? // I wander my new emptiness / as the small bag of her things I’ve brought / weighs down my hand
April 2024Surrogates
Twin had lived inside a concrete kennel for four of her five years. Wylie, who also lived inside a concrete box, had gone to prison as a teen. He’d cared for Twin since she was a puppy, which meant he had likely opened her kennel to feed her and let her out thousands of times.
April 2024
Stranger Kin
I don’t recall now if he barked, if he made a sound. How did it happen, that the rest came? They must have been summoned somehow. But it so happened that another dog appeared, lumbering toward us, followed by another, and a third and fourth, until there were five dogs gathered on the rocks. Five huge Istanbul dogs.
January 2024
Lawn Skeletons
As far as I know, the first house in the neighborhood to adopt a year-round skeleton display was a small Cape Cod a couple of blocks from me. The skeletons sat side by side, day after day, in their Adirondack chairs, holding hands as if starring in a Cialis commercial.
October 2023
Poem In Which I Fail To Teach My Dog How To Fetch
Here, I call, using the sweet voice the vet psychiatrist recommended, not the hell no one I prefer. Here, I call again.
August 2023
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