Waiting for Dogot
Three days to go. We complete nothing. Our bodies hung-dumb dry, and tired. The word dog
becomes apparent only in its absence. You say I’m spelling it backwards. Say I fumbled my
braids. I say you’ve never known of ash-tipped fingers on the root of your body. I say you’ve
never seen a dog the way I’ve known to look at a dog. Thick-padded footsteps down the
no-way-back roads. Eyes wild like fire rippling from their core. And in silent moments of
surrender at the foot of the stairs, a lazy low-lying animal in wait, made docile by the heat of
the radiator in the early days of spring, completely capable of tearing apart the skin from the
flesh beneath. Now I make sure you know they call them teeth in your mouth ‘canines’ for a
reason. All that capacity for the kill, eager and completely capable of lunging forward and
tearing open the body of a lesser-willed, warm-bodied thing, and yet they beg.
and yet they beg.
Two days to go. We absolve one another. Our limp braids unravelled and reworked with
verdant fingers. Today we say nothing. Instead, we do as our mother does, imitate the jaded,
full-blooded morning movements of her full-bellied frame. We lean down our sides to pick up
the laundry, walk with our legs shoulder-width wide, and in the last dusky, raw pink moments
of daylight, dappled in through the porch window, call the dogs back home. Together we
watch their backs move, as they come up over the hill, noting the way their legs wrench up
under them and jerk out again like springs. The way they make their own braids in the field,
overlapping each other in a serpentine weave. I clench my fist and think about striking you
with it.
I say look brother!
Say are you really looking?
One day to go. We exhaust ourselves. We stay quiet and mostly hungry. Slap the bases of our
heels into the meat of each other’s thighs under the kitchen table. Languid we sit, until night
carries herself in through the open window and settles the silhouette of the old elm across the
floor. This is how we know to collect our bruised bodies and clamber up the stairs for prayer
time and braids. Here, Maria feels like fresh water in the mouth, and we do not notice the
dogs are nowhere until we notice the dogs are nowhere. You say I told you to call the dogs in,
through clenched teeth I say brother—perhaps they have grown impatient—remembered their
nature—perhaps, the dogs are no longer waiting.
Cian Dennan is a poet and creative scholar. Cian completed her Master of Creative Writing at the University of Auckland with first class distinction. She has been awarded the Garth Maxwell Creative Project Prize, and the Kendrick Smithyman, Phoenix, and Shimon Weinroth prizes for her poetry.