abby e. murray

DOG

When you’re dying, how can I make it easier,
less painful, in a way you’ll know as love?

Instead, I deliver pain only humans would describe
as care: cold cloths on your sores,

ointment in your eyes, bitter pills hidden
in your favorite cheese. You look at me as if to say

you taught me better: when I was sick,
laid up on the couch, you stood on my legs

and growled at anything that moved nearby because
surely the world around me was guilty of my suffering.

Dog, I want to be more like you someday,
believing I can bare my teeth at death and make it

run, howling, back to the lonely den it comes from.
I want to feel convinced that no body could ever

fail from within, that it will live forever, safe,
if only it is guarded faithfully from the outside.

Abby E. Murray is the editor of Collateral, a literary journal concerned with the impact of violent conflict and military service beyond the combat zone. Her book, Hail and Farewell, won the Perugia Press Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the 2020 Washington State Book Award. A former poet laureate for the city of Tacoma, Washington, she currently teaches rhetoric in military strategy to Army War College fellows at the University of Washington.