The Dog Who Most Recently Died
would have approved of this snow
would have breasted through it
stopping to shove her muzzle
eyes deep in order to–what?
Relish the urine of an old friend?
Let the fresh scent of nothing
quiet her nose-lit brain?
Glad for winter’s blank screen,
a red-tailed hawk returns,
riding the curve of hunger
toward pines at the field’s end.
Earthbound, unmoored by wind,
I hold my shovel like a prop
and crave the certainties of sense.
Late Lyric
When we’re mostly lost, sent
in digital waves toward unfound worlds,
when the work of arraying words in lines
feels vaguely comic–even then,
our longing will tear the same sky.
We’ll long to be elsewhere, long
for the beautiful, happy dead, long
for a day in the past, for some
obscure future, and our longing
will mark us as children of Sappho.
We’ll call from drenched hilltops
and our unheard disembodied cries
will mark us as human, as those
who refuse to accept, insisting: You
who are elsewhere might yet be here.
I’m watching dusk blaze behind
a warehouse west of our kitchen,
while a neighbor makes her determined trek
around a sodden field and the trees
suck what they can from the earth.
And I’m drawn across the horizon
while scouring a burnt pan, being
one who scrubs and fears and hopes.
Solstice Funeral
after the Mass for the Homeless, Detroit, 2025
In a dark time, the eye
begins to see, saith Roethke,
though blind sober and damn
cold, we embalm regret
and pretend to weigh a future
in which we’ll draw our last.
I embarked to a funeral
for some I never met, or passed
unknowing, without a word.
Now a name resounds, another
rises, incensed, to the apse
of an elaborate church, names
spoken to ringing bells, names
of those who slept out
through a week of March rain
and those who froze unseen
in December. Blinkered,
we let death exact its misery.
The long night gives way
to a tin plate sky and some,
by luck, slide out on silk.
Fitness
The one-armed worker mopping the black floor
will proceed to corridor and restrooms,
placing caution signs as he goes.
I’m lifting, pedaling, stretching, recovering from fractures
and the vagaries of age–trying to dodge
recurrent doubts: that words carry heft
in the day’s maelstrom, that I’ll outlast the winter.
In a place devoted to motion, his is most smooth,
more music than metronome.
Don’t say effortless. I’ve done enough
to know the mop’s dead weight
growing stroke by stroke,
though I had two young hands then
and he’s sixty, easy. Effort and time
have been, are being, will be extracted
and the hourly rate won’t buy a coach seat
on a flight to his vanished home in Syria.
Some obscure code ordains that all gyms
are equipped with multiple TV screens
offering replays of the latest games and latest
shootings–today’s by a man killing a poet
in her car. The attendant rumbles
his bucket out of earshot.
He’ll dump gray water in a slop sink
and shift to scrubbing toilets. Tomorrow,
in back rows where boxers work,
he’ll start again, uncurling grace
beneath the heavy bags.
Michael Lauchlan’s work has appeared in many publications, including Innisfree, New England Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, The North American Review, Citron Review, Rappahannock Review, Louisville Review, and Sugar House. He has received the Consequence Prize for Poetry. His most recent collection is Trumbull Ave., from WSU Press. His next collection, Running Lights, is forthcoming in 2026 from Cornerstone Press.
Innisfree 42
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