Skip to content

My mother calls—she’s had the dream
again, the one where our first dog,
Ivy, has left and taken up with another
dog in the woods, and my mother
wants to make sure she is happy,
so she sits by the stream until finally
Ivy and this other dog pass through,
and it’s like seeing the unicorn
from the medieval tapestries, faun-footed,
wild, except this unicorn is Ivy
and she’s glad, briefly, to be found,
to have her downy temples rubbed while
the strange dog waits to the side, to have
her flank scratched again by my mother
before slipping back, untethered,
into the world that she made hers.