Barbara Fant
Bird dogs, they say

the kind that chase something in flight.
Try to capture with its teeth
a winged ceremony,
feathers dripping from each of their mouths.
The first dog was just plain old.
The second died of a heart worm pill
my father neglected to purchase.
What else has he let die?
My mother fixed his plate every night,
never bought a car, or shoes, or skirt
without his permission.
She birthed children and raised them.
She, my sister, and I

winged things in the air.
I knew there was blood under the ground.
No surprise when I found the house was sinking.
Our dogs always stayed outside, not allowed
in the living room.
Only the basement
where my father stayed, slept, fixed things.
My mother, a silent companion.
The dog barks and my father goes running.
The dog dies
and we bury my mother.
Graves for everyone.

We bark
and feathers fall from my father's teeth.
He barks and becomes the tree.
The bark remembers phantom noose
and screams.

The screech becomes a bullet
without a window to land through,
just a body,
a backyard,
a shovel.
from the book MOUTHS OF GARDEN / Sundress Publications
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This poem explores much of the grief, pain, and trauma from my childhood that my family lived through. We were all victims of the same experience. We all survived together and learned to love each other and heal together.

Barbara Fant on "My dad buried two dogs in the backyard"
Image of Chris Martin
"Chris Martin on Poetry, Autism, and Working with Neurodiverse Writers"

"Over time I began to discern how poetry's patterned structure uniquely serves neurodivergent thinking—and vice versa— something I'd discovered in my own creative investigations. Initially drawn to poetry because of its rhymes and rules, I soon discovered that inventing new patterns pleased me even more than recapitulating standard ones. As a baby poet living in San Francisco, having already tried sestinas and villanelles and contrapuntals and any other form I could find, I tasked myself with inventing a new poetic form every day for a year."

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Cover of Mihaela Moscaliuc's Book, Cemetery Ink
What Sparks Poetry:
Karen Anderson on Mihaela Moscaliuc's Cemetery Ink

"'Elegy for my mother's employer' is a case in point: love and precision ('your small frame/and freckled breasts') are shot through with fury ('Six months of this shit's enough'). This boss's flamboyant 'why not?,' is paired with a litany of her abuses....The end chimes with itself—Mother's 'fine,' rings with 'harm' and 'hell of time' and 'dying' and 'native ground' to remake her mother's apparent powerlessness as a calm that reaches beyond the arc of her employer's cruelty."
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