Song Dogs by Caitlin Scarano

                        Jeff Ruane CC



Song Dogs 

When I was eleven, my mother wrote a letter
to her father requesting he stop
molesting her daughters. His father taught him
not to drill deeper than two inches
when tapping sugar maples
for fear of reaching
the heartwood. How such a small distinction
can do so much damage. Anyway, the letter
worked. He became a skin-eating
ghost of his own house. Died grasping
for his aortic root
like the unspared rod. Spring
goes on and on here. Rain falls. Buds
swell. Robins flood the yard. The river
has no time for laughter. Fog tangles
in the tops of the mountain’s ciders
like an unwanted crown. Little hurts.
Like the time I closed my fingers
in the truck door and could only say
her name. Blame
between women is tricky like that—promises
a sturdy architecture, but only gives you
a paper floor. Two nights in the past month
I’ve heard a pack of yipping coyotes
surround the house before their own voices
spurred them on. I’ve drowned and dredged
up so many chapters of myself
just for the sake of the retelling. It’s a joke,
though. I’ve never been on either end
of a snake whip. Never had to save
the thing that devoured
what I loved. Never had to beg the way
​the women before me had to beg. 

​

Caitlin Scarano is a writer based in Anacortes, Washington. She holds a PhD in English an MFA in Poetry. Her hybrid chapbook The Hatchet and the Hammer was recently released by Ricochet Editions. Her debut collection of poems is Do Not Bring Him Water. Her work has appeared in Granta, Entropy, Carve, and Colorado Review. You can find her at caitlinscarano.com

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