Yellow Dog
       

When they put her down,
I couldn't stand to watch.
My hand on the doorknob,
I turned.

Coughing rust,
she gathered what memory
lodged in her muscles, tensed
as though to follow.
Her amber eyes took in mine.

They gave her back to us
in a plastic bag, a black
trash bag in a cardboard box.

We drove her to a field,
a friend's camp; a foot down
hit red clay. It took till dark.
The bag was awkward—
seventy pounds, untensed.

Even now, years past rooms
unstartled by her barking,
past floors swept clean of her shedding,
I see her beneath latex hands
on that steel table

after the one night of her life
she refused to spend under our roof.
(We'd found her at dawn—
she couldn't stand—
in the backyard fort left to rot
by children who'd moved away.)

A lab coat's sheen,
the ceiling's fluorescent haze.
Only her eyes were in focus,
seeming to grasp in mine
her last command: Stay.
Compelled, for once, to obey.

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Copyright © 2021 Ashley Mace Havird All rights reserved
from Wild Juice
LSU Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission