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      January 19, 2018My Mother and I Beat a DogMichael Sears

      for Maggie Daniels

      I
      In the months before our old dog died,
      my mother and I took turns beating it
      because the dog was sick and my father
      didn’t want to put her down. Are we
      going to put me down when I get old?
      he joked once, rubbing his bald spot
      while on the floor the dog writhed.
      There was something my mother and I
      hated in that dog when it slunk
      into the kitchen to lick the tiles
      of any crumbs, the sound of it an echo
      of my mother’s broom or wash cloth,
      the sound of it an echo of my own
      chewing as I ate, me and the dog,
      each time I ate, she and the dog,
      each time someone had eaten,
      in the kitchen at the same time,
      me and the dog eating, my mother
      and the dog cleaning, washing
      the counters and the floor.
      This was when my mother and father
      were getting divorced without knowing
      they were. It was as if not having
      a word for this deprived them of a word
      for anything, for instance, dinner,
      which my father began making nightly
      for the first time since I was born,
      chili-rubbed loins of pork, great dishes
      of primavera and lasagna that would sit
      in the fridge for days, going bad,
      no one touching them.
      My mother and I never ate his food.
      We were always out of the house anyway,
      though who knows where she went?
      I would pass through the whole town
      without seeing her, running first four,
      then eight, twelve, however many miles
      brought me out to the edge of town,
      the road running empty between grey fields
      of flattened corn stalks, the motion
      itself like a hunger. You could empty all of
      yourself into it, and still it
      could always take more.
      When my mother and I returned
      from our separate places, we’d meet
      in the kitchen. As she cleaned
      my father’s dishes, I would allow myself
      something small to eat. We spoke
      rarely. We were waiting for the sound
      of the dog’s uncut nails on the tiles
      as it limped in to lick the floor beneath
      my seat, and if my sister came in to ask
      where we’d been, we answered
      vaguely, already hearing its approach.
      “I can’t wait,” my mother said once,
      “until it dies.” This was toward the
      end, long after the days when we flirted
      with what we were doing, staging
      clumsy kicks, deliberately wide swats
      that would send the dog, untouched,
      hurrying to the edge of the room.
      But always it would return, and the sound
      of its licking—intent, rhythmic, obsessive
      —would resume. Soon, we began
      chasing her, but the dog could hardly
      move. When it still stood there we’d
      scream, then began miming the blows
      that became real blows and eventually
      it seemed that instead of coming into
      the kitchen for food, it’d come to be
      punished, though I know now that’s
      false, that once you punish something
      you give up your knowledge of
      whatever it had been, the way people
      in my hometown, Sunday after
      Sunday, try to lift Christ onto his
      Godhead by crucifying him again and
      again in their minds, trying to find that point
      where agony blurs into something else.
      II
      As a child I stole a pair of panties
      from my babysitter, Maggie,
      right out of her drawer and each time
      I saw her after that, I’d think of how
      my fingers played cat’s cradle
      with the purple silk, her scent
      vanished already, because
      I’d grabbed a clean pair.
      She probably never knew,
      or if she did, she might’ve
      just laughed at me,
      but at the time, when my mother
      dropped me off at her house,
      I couldn’t see her, but only
      what I’d done.
      It was the same, years later,
      long after I’d hid or lost or
      thrown away those panties,
      when my mother would say
      of my sister that she looked
      just like Maggie—the same
      eyes, the same skin—I’d look
      at her, but I could only see
      what others might do.
      III
      When I got the call about Maggie’s murder,
      I was in Virginia, as I had been
      when my mother called to tell me
      our dog had died. She said that
      when my father carried her wrapped in a blanket
      to the back of his car, he did it
      clear-eyed, like another chore.
      I remember how someone once told me
      that everyone in our dreams is another
      version of ourselves. I wonder too if, awake,
      in pain, we’re always confusing ourselves
      and others, that maybe, that day, my father
      had tucked himself into a blanket and was
      carrying that self, clear-eyed, balding,
      unwanted in the house, to be buried.
      When my mother finally told him that he
      had to move out, he argued with
      silence, his softness a protest, as if by
      turning invisible and mute he’d be illuminated
      by the light of his own loss. My mother,
      when she told me about the dog, broke down weeping.
      Weeks after I got the call about Maggie,
      I heard how they’d found the murderer:
      they’d found a box in which he’d placed,
      as a keepsake, a dread of his own hair
      that Maggie had torn from his scalp
      in the struggle to stay alive and unraped,
      as if he wanted to remember that
      he could take something as large as a life
      and only end up with a dead piece of himself.
      IV
      After the funeral, my mother and I visited
      Maggie’s family for Christmas. There was a tree
      in the window. There were boxes on the porch
      going to the curb. In the house, there were
      six of them now. They wanted to know how
      we were, and for a long time, my mother and
      I spoke about ourselves, everyone comfortable
      with this subject. Maggie’s mother sat
      mutely, staring off. No one looked at her.
      Occasionally there would be a long silence
      in which it wasn’t clear if the family
      was waiting for us to ask about Maggie
      or we were waiting for them to talk
      or we were all simply waiting.
      Eventually, during one of those silences,
      Maggie’s father began to speak about her.
      I had heard that, after days of not
      knowing, unanswered calls, vague answers
      from the police, when the officers walked up to
      the door, he fell to his knees, already knowing
      what they would say. Now, he was saying
      how the community had come together
      for them, about the letters her students
      had sent. At some point, my mother asked
      about the trial and he began telling us how,
      in the jail, the other inmates often beat
      her murderer, and as he was telling us this,
      her mother said the first thing I’d heard
      her say in years. “I wish,” she said,
      and her husband fell silent. Everyone
      in the room turned. “I wish they would
      just kill him.” For a long time no one spoke,
      and then, even though we’d already talked about it,
      she asked how old my sister was now.
      As my mother began to, slowly,
      carefully speak about her own daughter,
      I stared into the dark of the hall,
      which the stairs climbed, wondering what
      they’d turned her room into.
      Listening to my mother talk about my sister,
      I realized she was as old now as Maggie’d been
      the day I climbed those stairs, in love, and only
      came down with a piece of fabric. In my eyes,
      my sister is still a child but my mother was saying
      how she’s old enough to know how to drive.
      I know this too: my mother has told her when
      she’s out, alone, to always keep, within reach,
      beneath the driver’s seat, a lead pipe.

      from #57 - Fall 2017

      Michael Sears

      “I didn’t start writing poetry until my mother called to tell me that my friend’s sister, a former babysitter of mine, had been murdered in her apartment. This was my first poem, and my first attempt to understand what happened.”