He couldn’t walk, eat, and my father didn’t tell me
until after he put my brother to sleep—
a kindness I never wanted, still don’t: take it back.
There was a hole the size of a pawprint in my chest
so I went outside to give my eyes something to do.
I remember it was hard to cry, as though the news
had blown out all moisture and made of my body
Oklahoma. There was something about the sky,
the way it bled, dimming over the horizon
where my brother went to bark and never came back.
Pass me a beer, I said to someone who wasn’t there,
I just want to hold it till all the cold is gone,
and I wasn’t talking about the can. Too warm,
we call it, when the inner and outer match.
Imagine Florida and two inches of fur.
Imagine a dog who saved my father from alcohol
and despair. He was my brother, my guardian,
my teacher, my guide, and he raised me
on a savage hunger for every morsel of this world:
we drooled fuck yes at the dog biscuits,
the only food left in the house. So dry, so dry:
maybe that’s what my grief recalled.
I used to throw my head back and bark when
I was young. (Rascal and I had long late talks.)
When I was fourteen, we lived alone together
for nine months, the animal just one of seven kingdoms
we inhaled. When he was fourteen, he sniffed the woman
who put the needle in his neck. (I wasn’t there, I wasn’t there.)
I’ve yipped a bit but haven’t howled at the moon since.
The low rumble of a growl, however, has never left
the spitworn nest of emptiness in my throat.
Our dog has a nose for injured birds.
We nurse them to one version of the sky
or its wingless other. And the pups
she cannot have, and the kids we do not have,
flock in dreams that rise like premonitions:
pick something sick, feed it, and if others
see its breath curl against the winter sky,
aren’t we decent parents? In Sheepshead Bay
the ocean takes the corner of a house, promises
she’ll be back. She’s been known to lie before,
but there’s arctic assurance in her vow.
The way the sparrows fill the forest
makes me wonder what my cells are singing.
My wife saves a drowning fly, hatches a plan:
hire mercenaries to mow down poachers.
If I weren’t broken, if life hadn’t stuck its hand
into the wiring of my nervous system
and yanked, I’d join her. We’d do one better.
We’d resurrect in ourselves a cross between
the saber-toothed cat and a pissed-off mammoth.
We’d fill the air with the blood-thick cries
Ricky Ray is a disabled poet, critic and editor who lives in the old green hills with his old brown dog, Addie. He is the author of Fealty (Diode Editions, 2019), Quiet, Grit, Glory (Broken Sleep Books, 2020) and The Sound of the Earth Singing to Herself (Fly on the Wall Press, 2020). He was educated at Columbia University and the Bennington Writing Seminars, and his awards include the Cormac McCarthy Prize, the Ron McFarland Poetry Prize, and a Liam Rector Fellowship. He is the founding editor of Rascal: A Journal of Ecology, Literature and Art, and his work appears widely, including in The American Scholar, Verse Daily, Diode Poetry Journal and The Moth.