Jayne Marek
Jayne Marek’s seventh poetry collection will be Dusk-Voiced (2024). She twice won the Bill Holm Witness poetry award and was a finalist for the Mary Blinn Poetry Prize in 2021 and 2022, among other shortlistings. Her writings and photos appear in Rattle, Terrain, Catamaran, The New York Times, Spillway, Bloodroot, One, Salamander, Eclectica, Women’s Studies Quarterly, Northwest Review, and elsewhere. Her photos have been used as cover art for Typehouse, Chestnut Review, Silk Road, Bombay Gin, Amsterdam Quarterly’s 2018 Yearbook, and The Bend, as well as for four full-length poetry books.
Understory
A dead dog, dumped in the woods,
presses into late-spring violets,
its hide caved between hips and ribs,
shoulder-bones like blackberry canes.
So my husband tells me.
I stand on a path out of sight
of the carcass, looking up
into kindly green light,
a mausoleum of cedars,
communal privacy.
I could step over to look
at the dog’s face, sunken and mudded,
its eyes unable to respond
whether or not they’re open.
My husband doesn’t say.
He knows I’d want to stroke the stiff fur,
strung as I am always
on my own wires. The poor flattened dead
unmoving, my hand open
where no whistle hangs in the air.
