My poem “Echolocation for Elderly Dogs” has been published in The Connecticut River Review. Here’s a copy below:

Echolocation for Elderly Dogs

My dog can no longer detect
the direction of my voice.
She peeks her head sideways
inquiring through my door frame, 
eyes glassy like ancient marbles
excavated from the desert
that have seen time immemorial
but now see nothing.

When I call her in, my voice
echoes in dimensions only
perceptible in dementia
and I am carried out of my body
into another room. Her ears 
now have the acoustics of an old church 
where the ceiling slants to misdirect hymns 
back down to the congregation, mimicking
the thundering voice of God above.

As though I am a ventriloquist
throwing my voice down the hall,
she runs opposite my room to find me,
just a dummy made of shadow
propped in the corner.
Like a submarine’s sonar
confused by a lonely whale
for a potential mate, 
she scratches at the floor, 
believing I had been buried 
under a lawn of worn berber.

But when I think of how I’ve paced
down the hall, sweat, pheromones,
and dead skin seeded into the carpet,
I am as much there for her as anywhere.
The residue of anxiety populates me
everywhere, a house of mirrors
built for a snout that bloops blindly,
but trustingly into the walls.

When she digs down to the hardwood below
her paws will pound like knuckles knocking
on a casket. Every dog is an archeologist
and I hope my skeleton will offer
the shinbone that I cannot.

Image Credit: Édouard Manet “A King Charles Spaniel” (1866)