HANDLER'S HANDS

by Michelle DeRose

First skin shrivels

without touch. Parent's

palm to baby's back

an initial prayer

for safe-keeping, offered

in heart's rhythm.

 

How maimed the hand 

that releases the leash

on a dog trained to maul.

Strokes fur to praise puncture,

urges sic, not stay.

Fingers turned incisors

on blue fields of fifty

rip red strips

on a father's back,

pierce our beating core.

A member of a foster family for newborn wards of the state of Illinois as she grew up, Michelle DeRose witnessed first-hand how simple touches soothed some of the many infants her mother nurtured. A life-long dog-lover and -rescuer, she still wonders if she and her husband rescue dogs or they rescue them. The perversion of this most basic of communication--love and calm conveyed when one living being gently touches another--blatantly revealed in ICE's actions in Washington state against Wilmer Toledo-Martinez should repulse us all.

THE SLIDE

by Cally Conan-Davies



When we met the moon was over the house.
Now the house is gone beneath the mountain,
And night drops weeping through the broken day.
On the ground the mired leaves of autumn
move in the drying wind, and blow away.


Cally Conan-Davies hails from Tasmania, and now lives in the Pacific North West. Her work can be read now, or soon, in The Able Muse, Angle, The Hudson Review, Kin, Lavender Review, Mezzo Cammin, The New Criterion, New Walk, Poetry, Quadrant, Raintown Review, The Sewanee Review, Shotglass, Southwest Review, Suptropics, Virginia Quarterly Review.