Cynthia Atkins

Black Dog

All day long, like death on furlough,
shadows loom. You hear panting,
the snout twitching through the dross
on metal pipes clanking in your bellows. 
You scope the far-reaching
hills where the ancestors yowl.
                It’s the bomb inside the coat
of the steamy man in the alley
around your throat. It’s the empty
stroller left on the street.  It’s what never
gets spoken aloud. A teenager
with the blown-out speaker next door,
biding you out of your mind.
               Bad posters on the wall.  It’s that time
another teenager drugged you on a bed,
speakers vamped louder than your screams.
It’s the stonework around bad omens.
It’s the grifter in your dark soul.
It’s the best poem you ever wrote.
The bad deeds, missed chances, the malware
              of shallow friends.  All the cut flowers
bought in a store to transmute
the howl. It’s the hand over your
mouth—Jane Doe—All that was missed
in the way of yourself.  Son kicking a ball
into the goal. The lone cricket crafting
night’s song into medicine.
              You’ll know when it comes
matted fur, fangs amped, a pouch
within the mouth to carry
a dead thing.  This time, when it roves
the neighborhood, scratches at the door,
you’ll dance manic for the dead, anoint
your own scent through the hole
left from your breath on the window glass. 

Cynthia Atkins

Cynthia Atkins (She, Her) is the author of Psyche’s Weathers, In The Event of Full Disclosure (CW Books), and Still-Life With God (Saint Julian Press 2020), and a collaborative chapbook from Harbor Editions, 2022. Her work has appeared in many journals, including Alaska Quarterly Review, Anti- Heroin Chic, Barzakh, BOMB, Cider Press Review, Diode, Green Mountains Review, Indianapolis Review, Los Angeles Review, Rust + Moth, North American Review, Permafrost, SWWIM, Thrush, Tinderbox, and Verse Daily. She earned her MFA from Columbia University and has earned fellowships and prizes from Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, The Writer’s Voice, and Writers@Work. Atkins lives on the Maury River of Rockbridge County, Virginia, with artist, Phillip Welch and their family. More work and info at: www.cynthiaatkins.com