by KateLynn Hibbard
Like all of us, you come with the baggage of old
relationships, the one who taught you not to accept being petted, to cower
beneath the coffee table when it’s time to go for a walk, to hate change.
But somebody clearly loved you once, someone who taught you
to dance in circles for your supper, to fall to the ground
and writhe on your back in the grass with the shiny pink sword of your penis
flailing in the breeze, to pop back up when you hear “Hey, are you dead?”
Like most bad decisions, I blame it on my mother.
I never meant to get another dog but then she died, leaving me
with an unexpected grief that only you could fill, you
with your angling for attention, your stubborn insistence on having
your own way. Maybe you are my mother, come back
to haunt me with the unfinished business of loving
the daughter she’d had as an afterthought – or so it seemed
to me. Who really knows the heart of their mother?
People like to say “my rescue dog rescued me,”
but I’m not having it. The truth is, you like other people
better than me – the meter reader, the random
house guest – you’re still looking for your real mother, settling
for second best. Still I wonder who you were before
you came to live with me – the wounded one who stands
like you’ve been poleaxed while other dogs play, who bites
when I try to put on your collar? Or the darling one
who twirls for a treat on chubby hind legs?
Who taught you to growl at the sounds
no one else seems to hear, to scream
when someone gets out of the car, to know
what it means to lose your whole world
with a dreaded phone call, the slamming of a door?
KateLynn Hibbard’s books are Sleeping Upside Down, Sweet Weight, and Simples, winner of the 2018 Howling Bird Press Poetry Prize. Some journals where her poems have appeared include Barrow Street, Ars Medica, Nimrod, and Prairie Schooner. Editor of When We Become Weavers: Queer Female Poets on the Midwest Experience, she teaches at Minneapolis College and lives with many pets and her spouse Jan in Saint Paul, Minnesota.
Emerge Literary Journal 