I stand at the very edge of my yard clicking my tongue to the backs of my teeth and making low coaxing sounds in the hope that at best it is resting and at worst it is just injured, that this beckoning to the dog on the curb will stir some sign of life. The flies starting to congregate do not muster even an ear flick and I already know but I won’t step off my property line, because in this spot I cannot see the dog’s face and without seeing the dog’s face I can entertain hope. I consider the swollen belly, bloat so soon? Or was there a handful of blind possibilities also now dead?
I call my mother to ask
who one contacts to
collect no one’s dead dog.
She says that the dead dogs
she has handled have all
been her own, the ones
she has carried upstairs
when their hips got too weak
or whose mouths she has
spooned baby food into
when their kibble became
too exhausting, each one
of them ushered with
loving strokes to their loyal
and domestic fur towards
a sleepy death,
nothing so violent,
so sudden as this dog
someone hit and left on the curb
in front of my house
this dog I am trying to will the rise and fall of a flank out of,
just one shallow breath from, some flicker that I am wrong,
some sign to unglue me from this spot
and send me down to the curb,
to reach out, and have my hand met with something warm,
something I could comfort or at very least
for the ability to blink,
to turn my head, long enough for the dog to be spirited away
by some means that will allow me to believe that it got up
and
went home
where it is
loved.