I’m pulling this poem along even as it resists
like my dog, nose deep in a bush
or every bush, bench, tree, telephone pole.
Maybe we’ll pause, the dog & me
while he inhales through all his millions
of nose sensors the little terrier
with the pink collar or the ass of the old mutt
with the grey muzzle. Or is it me, my nose sniffing
each alert, the beep on my computer—
the President lifting his leg again, marking.
I once heard someone call himself a ‘yellow dog
Democrat’ when I was visiting the South
in the days when the South was Big D
& we didn’t have red or blue, just the Blues.
I’m blue in so many ways these days—
blue as glaciers melting, blue like the blue
whales in danger & I’m a suffocating blue
even in my blue as a swimming pool state.
I can look out my window to a flag flying
off the front porch with blue in the left corner
where my state happens to be. We are generally left
of center and generally left out of anything important.
My flag is tattered from too many years in the sun
& is fraying along the white & red striped seams
or maybe it’s just from the state of well everything
you know & everything you know was once a dog’s life
until it became dog eat dog & yet here we are sniffing
the air for a sign—a signal that it’s safe again—when look
there it is big as forever, a blue, blue, indelibly blue sky.
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A frequent PRTN contributor, Heidi Seaborn is Editorial Director of The Adroit Journal and author of Give a Girl Chaos. Since 2016, Heidi’s won or been shortlisted for over two dozen awards and her poetry has been widely published. She’s an NYU MFA candidate.
Photo by Jurica Koletić.
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