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FROM The Paris Review
A man in long shorts tossed a tiny dog
into the leaves piled at the edge
of people’s yards, the dog
the same brown as the leaves.
Too small to bark
it squeaked as it was tossed.
I was seeing someone and we passed it
on our way downtown. A street where boys
stuck dollar bills over coils of shit
then watched who came along
and picked them up. Then they jeered
from the window. They were in college
living together. Girls lived together too
and it was warm enough you could
still see them tanning on their roof
or in the kiddie pools they dragged
to strips of grass along the sidewalk.
The dog’s name was Macho.
Each time we walked, I hoped
to see it. He found my hope
annoying, then pathetic.
I think you wish you were that dog.
No, I want it; I don’t want to be it.
I think you want to be it.
We were in love
or in some other thing love served
as cover for. It required constant testing,
trying to humiliate while seeming
innocent, uninvested. Back then
I didn’t understand that everybody
did these things, choking or pissing
on each other, having the girl
impersonate a child being molested.
You got somewhere and after
you were where you started.
We drove across the river
to a discount grocer where the baggers
wore black aprons over buttoned shirts
and pushed your cart out
to your car for you, even if you
asked them not to, it was mandatory.
Next door, the gas station sold souvenirs
of itself: lighters and what looked like earring boxes
packed with thumb-size gummy pizzas.
Sun touched the river.
Complicated trees leaned out
at angles to the water.
On the radio, a man who made
a movie was explaining no one
got it: it isn’t funny. The frozen
chicken triggers something
for the boy, his realization.
Around us stretched the aisles of the fields
then prairie, prairie grasses
over whose incessant restlessness the roads
and towns were pieced. And far out
moving slow across the earth
black carriages of Mennonites
drawn by horses.
My job was teaching acting at a middle school.
The skinniest of the Sams was most talented.
Asked to play an animal, the other children
jumped or squawked, but Sam’s face hardened
to a twitching glare, his paws examining
the rug before they crossed it.
On the porch, coffee cans
preserved summer rain, cigarette butts
gone tender, floating. You could smoke
and look out at the uncut lawn
down to the snapped stakes of tomato plants
he’d smashed when he was angry.
It had started with us laughing
lying in the grass, him saying
let me cut off a piece of your scarf
to remember today by. No
it started from my only
feeling I was myself
when I resisted things.
I turned away. I felt
his scissors in my hair. Late fall
the town put on its festival.
Three generations wandering
in jerseys, carrying foam fingers.
He was house-sitting
and along the walls, some books I knew
wore bindings I’d never seen.
They belonged together. They were all dark red
with notches down their spines.
If you debased yourself before a man
debased you then you’d have
a little peace. It was a choice then. It was
running ahead of the others and standing
on the bank where you could see
yourself how things went—the ragged
progress of the lichen, gnats, a swimming beach,
the concrete becoming gravel.
I thought that way for years.