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Old Dogs (Remember)
You’ve heard the saying. The first day at home,
snub-nosed and sweet, house-trained but otherwise
unbroken, our rescue ignored every trick
in the book—classic commands: sit, stay,
be good, I begged. But as the wisdom goes:
At some point, learning comes too late. The sun
sinks on the dull glare of what used to cut,
bitter and sweet and just out of reach
of memory. Redemption is for those
who remember, and my mother slaps the glasses
off my father’s face, laughing, her sharp edges
blunted into the barking violence of a bully.
Be good holds no water when the night falls,
dripping with the echo of another
she can’t recall. The sound of time running out
sounds a lot like the word they keep asking her,
sounds like something she can almost string
together. Sounds, a little bit, like surrender.
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Diana Cao is a writer and JD candidate at Harvard Law School, whose work has appeared in Ploughshares, The Georgia Review, 32 Poems, and elsewhere. She has received support from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and International Literary Seminars, and her writing has been nominated for a PEN/Robert J. Dau Award and Best New Poets. She is a winner of Nimrod International‘s 2023 Neruda Prize, and she likes night swims, talking to citrus, and the gloaming.
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No Escape from Within, photo by Tony Luciani of his mother
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Author: Terence Winch
