Get a dog and walk it

Abstract

Get a dog and walk it Clare Paniccia (bio) from McCallis Magazine's 1958 article, "129 Ways to Get a Husband" Bobo, then 20, was abducted on the morning of April 13, 2011. She was last seen being led into the woods away from her home by a man dressed in camouflage. Chip Washington with the Shelby County Sheriff's Office said their department sent a cadaver dog to assist in the search. Tennessean, March 2014 holly All month I feed Decatur hair-grease & canine. I feedthe county from my bullet hole from my lunchbox my mossy oak mouth. Somebody please go& find out what my mother meant when she asked why I never lefttown. Is it because of the spirits? The silence? Once, I watched my brother flick a lighter under aspoon & breathe each ghost like a treat—first the father & son, then the blessed lamb himself.When I tried it, I felt amaranthine, my head a bucket full of rubies& rare earth. Did you know [End Page 126] there's a god in everything if you listen long enough to conjureone? Put your ear down near the dirt—I overheard a man saying this in a bar by the interstateright before blackout, the shell in my sinus, hush-a-bye my baby waydown in Missouri playing through the pickup stereo like a lullaby. Here's a list of evidence: onerotten molar, a stick of lip balm, a condom; in Parsons they found a snake that had swalloweda tongue. Each dark strata becomes an inventory. In the morning, myheadache triggers a landslide. alert Marge sends us home with a windpipe & we spend our night apologizingto each muscle individually. I'm sorry, you say before cutting the throat. I'm sorry to the cricoid, cartilage—in Cairo, we tack the dog in Kevlar & run him through an abandonedplayground for practice. I'm sorry we say to the slush piles, the kiddie slide, to the hyoid bone hidden inthe ginseng patch. Radio silence. Dead air. You whisper something [End Page 127] about evidence & I picture a totemof a girl, her glass eye & all its film-shot angles, each negative an open mouthon repeat. I'm sorry, I'm sorry. But, what can we do? At home, I have to stop myself fromsetting her a place at the table. Even the dog senses some deception —a vision reoccurring: policebursting onto the scene, steam still rising from dinner plates;your fingers wrapped around the paring knife. Don't shoot! you yell, we're good guys &you point to the dog & say Tell 'em, boy. Tell 'em we're good. & here, bed-locked in morninghaze, who's to know? Just yesterday, I siphoned drug money fromthe emergency fund. I watched you beat the dog for tracking mud onto the carpet, your mantra I'm sorry,I'm sorry. As if the trigger pull isn't ingrained, the way he sits outside the door on alert. I knew beforehe'd pawed at the dirt that there'd be an unearthing. I take him out, his nosea polygraph. I follow. The dog walks. [End Page 128] Clare Paniccia Clare Paniccia received her doctorate in poetry and digital rhetoric from Oklahoma State University. Her work has been featured in or is forthcoming from Radar Poetry, Mid-American Review, Indiana Review, Best New Poets, and Tri-Quarterly, among others. She lives and works near Minneapolis, Minnesota. Copyright © 2022 University of Nebraska Press