Martha Clarkson

WHAT'S HAPPENED TO THE HOUND

It’s all fancy dogs now
romping off-leash
in sanctioned grass
schnoodle, bullpug, pitsky
no one ever says
“he’s a hound”
 
Weren’t all those barking fox-chasers
just beagles anyway?
 
And Elvis belting out
a backhanded tribute

IN THE UNLIKELY EVENT OF AN EMERGENCY

promises the flight attendant
draped in the cord of the oxygen mask
as she demonstrates our rescue
unlikely though it may be
and no one watches
or could say the location of the flotation device
or which string to pull to get oxygen
we may know to put on our mask first
and then our child’s
but we probably won’t do it that way
when the unlikely time comes

AFTER HANNAH

Side to side we lie
on a made bed
upturned broken birds
counting bumps
in the cottage-cheese ceiling
listen for her bantam cries
like hoping to hear the ocean in a shell.
 
Hitchcock lined up crows
on the cold bars of a jungle gym
ready for children–
 
the things we can’t face
peck our eyes out
we’re just a flock of air
gulls diving for stale bread
glad to wing a thermal drift.

MARTHA CLARKSON’s writing can be found in The Seattle Times, Seattle Review, Portland Review, The Sun Magazine, Mothering Magazine, Feminine Rising, Quarter Past Eight, Nimrod and many other places. She is the winner of the Anderbo Fiction Prize for the story “Her Voices, Her Room,” which has been produced as a podcast by PenDust Radio. She has two notable short stories in Best American Short Stories. Martha was a former poetry editor for Word Riot.