SAY THEIR NAMES

by Pamela Kenley-Meschino

Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-Fla.) on Tuesday read aloud a passage of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s memoir in which she describes shooting her pet dog, Cricket, during a committee markup on a bill related to deporting migrants who harm animals. —The Hill, November 18, 2025

She killed the dog, he said,

reading from her own words,

shot a puppy not yet grown,

its unruliness put down.

 

Fourteen months young,

he spoke the name so we could

witness her transgression,

not the puppy’s—Cricket.

 

Some snickered at the obvious,

a killer of dogs in charge,

rounding up castaways

for gravel pits unknown. 

 

It’s no joke.

 

Some countered stories

from the other side, 

of beagles left behind in labs,

abuse for an abuse.

 

What about that?

 

All agreed that dogs must

not be harmed. 

Save them all from 

cruelty’s bloody hands.

 

We vouch for Cricket’s rights

as we shout for human rights,  

to live without fear or discrimination.

We need to say all their names.

 

She killed the dog; in her own 

words, she hated the dog.

 

Pamela Kenley-Meschino is originally from the UK, where she developed a love of nature, poetry, and music, thanks in part to the influence of her Irish mother. She is an educator whose classes explore the connection between writing and healing, as well as the importance of shared stories.

BRILLIANT

by Katherine Smith

Bruce MacKinnon editorial cartoon February 10, 2022.

The best moment of my day

happened two hours after

I packed my black puppy into the car

when I screamed yes!

when the guy from triple A turned the key in the jammed lock,

a fine moment for human ingenuity. Twenty minutes later

I was driving down the Beltway behind a thousand trucks, a banquet

of American flags rippled from the empty cabs

of eighteen wheelers, a freightless load

of freedom fluttered in the exhaust filled air.

My puppy whimpered in the back seat.

Horns honked. Don’t tread on me,

in brilliant yellow, the red maple leaf

of Canadians blurred the air. On the overpasses

a few lone bodies waved as the trucks drove under.

I searched for my exit. Put my hand in the back seat to comfort the puppy

headed away from the capitol towards the country.

 

I am afraid of stupidity

whether it is driving an empty truck

around the Beltway at rush hour

to protest a mask mandate

while fuel is 4 and a half dollars a gallon

while people are dying in Ukraine

or a student is crying because she has 85 0000

of student loan debt. I didn’t used to be so judgmental

when I had more stupid of my own

when I fled my friends to meet a lover in Boston

whom they despised for good reason

and ruined my life for a couple of years. No one minds

their own stupid even when it distracts them

from the fact that people are dying. Even when I,

a woman who happens to be perfectly sensible today

looks at the convoy

and knows in her bones

that this is what stupid looks like. I keep driving away.

Maybe brilliance is nothing more than enough

hopeless blindness to kill the world

everywhere for everyone. Still,

when I get out of the car the sweetness

of daffodils spills through the air. So far human ingenuity

hasn’t reached the mountain or the reflection

of the moon in the James River.

Katherine Smith’s recent poetry publications include appearances in Boulevard, North American Review, Mezzo Cammin, Cincinnati Review, Missouri Review, Ploughshares, Southern Review, and many other journals. Her short fiction has appeared in Fiction International and Gargoyle. Her first book Argument by Design (Washington Writers’ Publishing House) appeared in 2003. Her second book of poems Woman Alone on the Mountain (Iris Press) appeared in 2014. She works at Montgomery College in Maryland.

MICAH IN THE MIDST OF THE PANDEMIC

by Katherine M. Clarke

Micah

Our puppy arrives, six pounds
of squirming golden fluff chirping and burrowing
under my arm, trembling against my breast.

I reach back to my mother’s knee to find
what I’ve forgotten I know, singing
knick-knack paddy whack give the dog a bone

and nestle him into his crate with Mr. Krinkle
whose face he chews off but who still obligingly rustles,
offering rope hands and feet to gnaw on in the night.

As pandemic chaos reigns outside, love grows inside,
my beloved Lily handling and tending this small body
bursting into life, insisting on what he wants and needs

tired or not, frightened or not, a life counting on her.
She walks softly in stocking feet to feel him underfoot
to know when he races over her toes to hide.

Scooped up Micah rides high along her arm,
a pasha attended by his servant.
Firsts abound—sleeping through the night,

tasting snow, eating grass, throwing up.
Accepting a collar and lead as she hustles
him out the side door to the yard.

Victory, cheering, applause. Relief for both.
No need for social distance as the lord of all wriggliness
plays with Delores, a stuffed sheep, and Road-Kill Buzzy,

the flat woodchuck toy. A spiky rubber teething ring
on the shower curtain spread over the living room rug
as if a sphere of the virus had leapt from the television

screen filled with images of tents and stadiums for hospitals
warehouses loaded with coffins, trucks filled with bodies
while we shelter at home, grateful, joy strewn all around.

Katherine M. Clarke is a professor emeritus of Antioch University New England. Her essays and poetry have appeared in Writing it Real, Breath and Shadow, Wordgathering, Oasis, The Sun Magazine, and Northern New England Review.

NEWS HOUR IN DUFUR, OREGON

Original photo by Lynn Ketchum for Oregon State University: Flowering rabbit brush brightens Oregon’s rangelands and provides sustenance to a great golden digger wasp.

Penelope Scambly Schott is a past recipient of the Oregon Book Award for Poetry. Recent books are House of the Cardamon Seed and November Quilt. Dufur is a small (pop: 623) wheat-growing town in north-central Oregon.