The Dog House

Suzanne Morris

December 1, 2021

-for Boots

Today I thought of you as your dog house,
collapsed into separate pieces,

rode away in the buggy:
sturdy redwood, to be repurposed

as your body has been,
the primary element of Creation.

Well made, the dog house, by a
German company

even the instructions were correct
your Master noted

as he assembled it in hopes
you would use it

which you did, after a fashion,
making the roof your sleeping porch,

preferring the freedom of outdoors.

You wiled away long moonlit nights
nibbling at the corners

and it was those nibbled edges on the wood
gave me pause today when

the whole thing was loaded up
having survived you

on that misbegotten night when

your love of freedom
wound up costing your life,

collapsing our hearts into pieces.

Suzanne Morris is a novelist with eight published works, most recently, AFTERMATH (SFA University Press, 2016), a survivor's tale from the New London school tragedy of 1937. Until last year, her poetry appeared only in her fiction. Then, she was invited to contribute seven poems to an anthology entitled, "No Season for Silence - Texas Poets and Pandemic" (Kallisto Gaia Press, 2020).