Zero Recovery

Photo: Hand stone water.  David Graham

It's my great joy to be able to feature some recent poetry by Josh English, whose work I've been following with close attention and delight since he was a mere pup.  Currently roaming the streets of Louisville KY, he'll soon be off to Tuscaloosa AL, where he will pick up a second graduate degree, and continue writing his fearsomely good poems.

Zero Recovery

One afternoon one pitbull

pounds its head against

a loose fenceboard

its blunt face a quill of splinters.

And when the wood fails –

first pinhole in a dam’s face –

it splits the neighborhood park open

to the calibrations of error and threat.

I heard rake tines drag

on cement nearby, their clicking

like a rotary dial returning to zero.

The pitbull ripped across the green.

When it snapped and fixed

to my dog’s throat, I knelt

in a kind of prayer

and pounded the dog’s face.

I say prayer because

of the reverent uselessness I became

as each fist splashed

off the dog’s skull,

each kick landed wet

while my dog was killed.

Try to split a boulder

with a bucket of water,

float a lake

so you won’t have to see it.

I wrestled a stone

from the lake bottom,

kicking my way to surface,

my arms crossed over the deep stone. 

My arms or lungs

gave out and the stone fell,

slow as breath rising,

back into the green-black.

I’d surface, gasp, then plunge back

to pat the silt, blind, for the stone.

Into night until

I couldn’t find it anymore.

But when the owner

loped across the park,

his dog released the throat’s wet hank,

and he hefted it by the harness

to his shoulder,

like a carry-on after a flight. 

And now each day I cruise

looking for him,

rage’s slick weight

on my chest, the branch tips

summoning bud,

the asphalt opening cracks.

My baseball bat in the passenger seat

absorbs each glancing shadow,

and the stone becomes

unbearably heavy and I can’t breathe

when I think I see his face.

--Josh English