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The Dog
Gabrielle Bates
He didn't want to tell me. He almost didn't.
It was luck much more than gut that made me ask
A beer opened an hour earlier than usual,
the desire for conversation. There was no sense in me
that he was in some sort of aftermath.
He said, when I asked, I had a bad day,
or, I had a weird day, I can't remember.
I saw a dog, he said. I was on the train.
A man with a dog on a leash. The man ran and made it
but the dog hesitated outside, and the doors closed—
no, not on his neck—on the leash, trapping it.
The man was inside, and the dog was outside on the platform.
The button beside the door, ringed in light, blinked.
The man was shouting now, hitting the button,
all else silent, the befuddlement
of dog pulled along, the pace slow until it wasn't.
The tunnel the train must pass through leaving the station
is a perfectly calibrated, unforgiving fit.
The dog had a color and a size I don't know,
so it comes to me as legion.
Large. Small. Fur long, or short. White or gray.
But the man always looks the same.
As I held him against me in our kitchen,
the moment sharpened my eyes. How easily
I could imagine a version of our lives
in which he kept all his suffering secret from me.
I saw the beer on the counter. I saw myself drink it.
When we went to bed, I stared at the back of his head
split between compassion and fury. My nails
gently scratching up his arm, up and down, up and down,
the blade without which the guillotine is nothing.
from the book JUDAS GOAT / Tin House
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At the Bread Loaf Writers Conference in 2019, Vievee Francis charged me to go write something ferocious and ugly—something that wouldn't contort in order to please or impress others. "The Dog" is what I wrote that day.

Gabrielle Bates on "The Dog"
Color image of the cover to Anthony Joseph's book, Sonnets for Albert, which won the T. S. Eliot prize
"How Poetry Helped Me Love My Absent Father"

"He remembers his father as being 'very charismatic and very funny,' someone he would always look forward to seeing. 'It would be sort of like this hero figure coming back out of the desert.' When Joseph’s father died in 2017, he began to think of writing a selection of sonnets for him, and the result—after bending the form slightly to make the poems more musical—is Sonnets for Albert. 

via THE GUARDIAN
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Color image of the cover of the journal Aufgabe, 10
What Sparks Poetry:
Andrew Zawacki on Sébastien Smirou's "The Lion"


"The orthodox part of the evening once completed, we turned to our current project—very much under construction—namely, the English translation of Sébastien’s sophomore book, a bestiary titled Beau voir....The plan was Sébastien’s, inspired tangentially by the so-called 'torture test' that Olivier Cadiot and Pierre Alferi had devised, which involved translating Robert Duncan’s falconer-mother back and forth between English and French, so the original would bloom anew through its successive degradations."
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