Liza Flum

Aubade

After a poem of the same name by Cameron Awkward-Rich

My dog doesn’t wake me.
He sleeps at my knees
in the sheets. And when I

pull his yawning body
close, he licks my face, like
anyone’s kiss. I once praised

my sixth-grade students: “Kiss
your brains! For each
answer, kiss your thumb,

then, touch it, quick,
to your forehead, like this!”
Now, I never give

my brain a kiss. Instead,
each night I swallow
a tablet to keep the wires

in my head apart,
and prevent a mind-fire,
though the pill leaves me z

curled like an ammonite,
with a stony skin.
My dog sleeps between me

and my lover so we don’t
touch each other. Still there
is no part of my brain left

untouched: like a wind sock
shaped like a fish in the wind,
it swims in air: inside

and out: it is always
being entered: as if
a fish belonged in the sky:

as if a mind could stay
aloft, dancing in this breezy
element. My body,

inside and out, was once
a place lovers met. Now,
though I turn from my lover,

I hold my dog tight.
He is a retriever. Each
day he welcomes me to earth

as I drop like a fish
from the sky. Me
blinking in sheets—

Where am I?
And for what? My dog
fetches my body to me

in his mouth, and I
reach out both hands
to touch myself.

Domestication

I still haven’t given up on the
future, despite stopping to take a breath
whenever I think of it. Like tonight, taking
the dog out to pee in the parking lot, I look
at the moon over the carport and think: five
years from now—
it is dizzying—five years from now,
(as he tugs at the end of his rope,
nosing buried smells) more creatures might
be mothers. Stars over the carport are
bright, alpine: like the summit where I took
my sixth-grade students on a hike: we saw
a bear and her cub in pine trees, and I
said, don’t look, just walk: mud on my
shorts and in my pack a bag of tampons,
all used, I thought the bear would notice: I
am afraid to say my child, the future. Did it
help, did it save us, that no one looked?