Juanita Smart
Image by Lisa Fotios from Pexels
Juanita Smart holds a Ph.D. in English and Composition from Washington State University, but received her best schooling in the humanities after college, while working the 3 to 11pm shift at the Salvation Army Crisis Intervention and Emergency Shelter in Hartford, CT. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in About Place Journal, River Heron Review, and Rise Up Review, among others. She finds nourishment and joy in the company of other writers and animal lovers, and drafts her best ideas for poems while rummaging through local Pennsylvania wilds “off leash” with her three dogs Gabe, Liberty, and Wilson.
The Way the Dog Dreams
(For Cornbread)
Inside the roomy dome of the dog’s sleep skull
water thickets, riffling with the sheen
of tiger trout. The tiger trout
grin with mouths that are wounded roses.
The dog grins too. His mouth is a moonless marsh
rank with the delicacies of violence and delight.
In the slough of sleep, the dog races,
scavenges what remains, tongue velvet-slick
with maple rain and ooze.
When the far-away freight train’s whistle howls
the dog stirs—scratches an ear,
licks himself and turns. He tucks into his bones
the way dusk tucks into nighttime,
the way the unremembered
tuck into the shoulders of God.
The dog haunts a place of buried hungers
where all the living he holds inside his body
folds him in the shapes of dreams.
Wings of river swallows eddy, skim above shallows and stills.
Dog breath ghosts as winter twilights--
darkness falls open like a parachute.
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