Stay Safe

Luther Hughes

The dog outside won’t stop swallowing the city
with its harping. Sooner or later some good citizen
will peek through their blinds asking themselves
about the fuss, wanting to know what cruel somebody
abandoned such loyalty—some Golden Retriever, some
snip-tailed Rottweiler, who knows. Next to me, he is asleep, the one I love, the one who promised me a dog in the long seasons to come. He says when the sun is at its most weary, when the sky collapses into the Cascades, when the wounds of autumn vanish into miles of snowy flesh, then.

The truth is, who knows what will happen to either of us. We are always one bullet away from the graveyard, a murder of memorial hymns. And if that’s the room we’ve been born into, then why do the sparrows break the morning with song?

Why do the fir trees fight bark and root for their green?
Sometimes I hear the Earth’s sunken voice saying, Come home, come home. And who am I to argue with the one
who has given us so much? But dear eager Earth, I want him to live forever. I want the dog outside to have met my dead dog.
I hardly think of him, of how our neighbors shouted at us
to shut him up. One day they did it for us, poured searing water onto his body. The grass around him became shredded hairs.
The bees fevered and worried. I watched what happened to an animal unwelcomed, underserved. When I tell him this as he armors himself for the day, he says that will never happen again. Oh, to be as certain as wind! Not true, I want to say, but I can’t have everything. I can’t have the yellow from the small
patch of dandelions, can’t have the echo of laughter rolling over rooftops, over the hush of engines and bicycle bells, can’t bring the dead back to life. We won’t live forever, but I am afraid some wrong citizen will mistake him for a scar on the neighborhood—
they will take him from me. I settle with a covering spell: Stay safe.
He walks out the door and into a spray of sirens.