Dog Songs

everytime i hear a bark, i think of you.

there is no breath here. inside myself i hear a threshing—i left to die somewhere you couldn’t see. god still doesn’t talk to me, though there are angels sometimes. in the cave of their refractions they patch me with pigeon wings, i like to imagine i’ve become their favorite testmonkey. i don’t escape the thought of being tidied.

i miss the laze of chance. curation spoils.

it’s lizard season. my cat, Bug, waits by the door to my father’s garden, raring. i’m convinced he was a mongoose once, in a simpler time. my poor Bug, he’s been inside his whole life, so he doesn’t realize they’re not toys. when he proudly scrambles back to me, with them writhing and bleeding in his mouth, he doesn’t realize they’re not playing, like he is. i hate that no matter how simple i’ve tried to keep him, he is still a machine of instinct. i’m afraid of what lies in my children.

and still yet, i want him to see the world, the same one that is too much with me, that would be too much with him, given the chance.

though, i can’t get the memory of him pawing at one of his catches, seemingly confused as to why it wouldn’t get back up and play. it’s just a game isn’t it? i’m afraid the innocence i bestowed on him begets this cruelty, and more than that, i’m afraid on some level he knows exactly what he’s doing.

i’ve cut my teeth on such malleable things. so long i spent thinking i was somebody.

* * *

on days like these i wake not with the terror of other days, but with a sort of sickness i can only explain through a methodical bisection—my stomach feels yellow, while my head is sky-blue, as starling brood. an anxiety binds me to my father’s garden, like a snared rabbit nestled, finally, in the downy contentment of resignation.

i find again the friends of my childhood—Mr. Snail is doing well, it’s actually his great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandson who greets me now, who’s gotten all grown and has a family of his own, with many other great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandsons on the way. Marm Worm, i imagine, has been a Mrs. many times over, and in the mornings i see her steadfastly trestling through the same earth, diligent as a truffle pig. i wish my father wouldn’t step on her toes sometimes, he’s never been aware of the good neighbors around him.

he collects impound horses in a crackpot, and boils them until the meat has fallen off, hawking the bones to corked passerbys, already choking on their own wishbones. he doesn’t realize he’s the only one who chews marrow in this neighborhood. i don’t think he wants to realize.

Mr. and Mrs. Lizards don’t talk to me anymore, on account of Bug’s previous behaviors, and the days of playing tag with their children are long gone. even without Bug, i’m too old anyways.

never too old for Miss Spiders though. i don’t crack anymore in my sleep—i think, can’t be too sure, maybe they feel safe in spite of it—and now they lay their webs between my pillows and the mattress. i hope one of them is pregnant soon. i’ve heard that a nice neighborhood is one where eggs are hatched.

recently, i finally sat with a creeping suspicion that’s followed me over the years. it told me, in the plain words that work best with me, that time does pass, and the body does grow old, but the mind is tectonic, slow in its measure and cataclysmic in its forecast. i could only sit silently and pass it another diet coke.

the evening passed, nonetheless, and in retrospect, it was rather sweet of it to confess to me.

it left as simply as it knocked, three soft in hesitant succession.

* * *

i saw a valley green today, bursting with alfalfa—

i ran through it, and felt their stalks bend in my wake, electrolytic. another diamond day, another green face—birds of paradise hawk their nests, the refrain of my hunger keeps itself from crescents of larceny, and in time i convince it of its own imagery.

my father is someone only my mother could love. instead of fixing the broken windows in our house, which is most of them, he buys her a new twin mattress, to lie in the middle of the living room, in front of the illusions. i never liked where it was, open to surveillance. but my mother is good at keeping her mind off of things, or perhaps she enjoys having us revolve around her to get to anything.

i get mad at my father for wasting money on the mattress, and not fixing the windows. my mother gets mad at me for not seeing that even when the world is falling apart, my father will always burrow a hole for my mother’s comfort.

i don’t like her lessons, i don’t like that sort of love. but that sort of love is what endures, i’m assuming. i’ve never seen anything else, with my own eyes at least.

the old twin mattress was my childhood one, which i repossessed to my cave, the garage. both my parents never throw anything away, even if they see people differently.

i learned a long time ago that two dominant genes can sometimes produce a recessive one, but even the recessive one is a product of its makers.

it’s too hot to run now.

* * *

a belly can be a bag, i’ve learned.

Ms. Possum came by tonight, twice! the first time, we hadn’t yet left the food out, and she rose and clicked at me through the glass—i’m not sure if she was indignant at the delay or apologetic for asking. that’s the thing about language, without understanding we can only reflect our own splintered mirrors. i’ve learned to rely on the obvious, however, and the bowl was empty—all i can do is my own good part, and hope for the best.

my mother has seen Ms. Possum bring about her children, earlier in the year. apparently they were little ragtags, no bigger than mousey whisps to her unfocused eyes. i’m not sure how old they are now, but i wonder if she still eats for them. i wonder if she feels ashamed for begging, or victorious at her finds—i wonder what face she has when she regurgitates it for her children, if she still does.

i wonder if it’s one of her daughters that comes by now, and because of my ignorance, i can’t tell the difference. this difference pains me.

Bug called me when Ms. Possum came the second time. i think he gets excited that another creature, seemingly unlike him, eats the same food he eats. he does the same whenever the birds peck at it, too, during the day. he tries to chirp like they do, as his elder sister once did so beautifully before she passed, but his little voice croaks, forever pubescent.

Ms. Possum is a furtive woman. she reminds me of a little sparrow. i want to build her a bath, somewhere only she could go. maybe one day i’d spot her peel her furs and reveal the nymph underneath, woefully shaded by some godly avarice.

maybe her children, too, would shed their earthen coats, and together they would spring as fresh stars inheriting the greenness of festered heavens.

but i don’t know where she goes when i’m not there to look. there are so many things i cannot know about her. that pains me too.

* * *

today i watch the fences breathe, soft and slow.

the first elementary school i went to was angled between goat and alpaca ranches. if you were coming out from the schoolhouse, the goats populated the western fenceline, the side where the sun would rest uneasily in the afternoon and welter us with the taut heat of an adobe oven, particular to the San Bernardino chaparral. the alpacas were enclosed next to them on the southern end, and the estates were split by wooden posts tangled with wire, meeting at the southwestern corner. our rectangular field was separated from the ranches with a tall fence of aluminum alloy, misshapen in places from various juvenile impacts.

between the western fence grew a large fern, which had once demarcated the property line before the school was built, and though it was planted on the farmside, its fanned branches sloughed over to the schoolyard’s. we would tear the leaves and give them to both the goats and alpacas, and i can still remember the feeling of crushed fern stickied between my fingers, and the texture of their tongues on my hands, as we fed them through the diamonds.

pushing myself through with my verdant offerings felt like a part of me went to another place, holier, where not only instinct was one with action, but where the cruelty of innocence had infinite absolution, by simple virtue of beasthood.

more than that, there was a subconscious recognition of a blankness—in my eyes and theirs.

i hid myself for years, hoarding an inarticulable guilt at both the indiscretion of my halfling birth and my own fractional awareness of it. original sin was not only to be known, but to know ourselves, and my mother regularly scalded me with heavenly chastisement for attempting both. it was not easy, when each day’s adolescent indignities flayed me guiltily outward.

my father, around this time, planted dozens of rosebushes, whose remnants line the three pathways that still so concretely cut through the garden. my father suffers from a carnivorous kineticism, which impulses him to cycles of anxious activity; in his charge, he would shear each rosebush just after its first flower, season after season, so that even now, twenty years later, the bushes remain at the same height as when they were planted.

i can’t tell what satisfaction he gets from thorny stems, but at this point i don’t think he can help it. to him, there’s an immortality in newness, a fantastical promise in nascence. but there is no motion in still pictures—in keep of the image he supplants his own energy, and i fear in him the same blankness i fear in myself. i fear he sees it in the thorns and petals of his rosebushes, as i do in my animals, and both of us are damned in reflection of gardens and arks so likened to our own dreadful images.

but even in dread there is a wonder, and they tread of each other with a timeless synchronicity, transposed like strips of film.

____

Jannat Alam lives in San Bernardino County and is the editor of Reap Thrill.