In Defense of the Dogs, by Margo Moceyunas

Art by New York Public Library

*Word strips taken from the Catholic Youth Bible Third Edition, Nabre: New American Bible Revised Edition and the children's book GoD and DoG by Wendy Fransisco.

I.

II.

the body starts to accumulate

the hurt

the persistence of grief

in the bones

what crimes must i accept?

regrets pile like the end of fall leaves

lying drunk in the cold, wet loneliness

III.

IV.

this strain of shame is at a standstill — i catch snowflakes on my tongue — swallow

whole and still parched but won’t ask for more — ask me to define my love and i’ll hand

you the sound of my dog’s pitter-patters — ask me to give myself and i’ll cut my losses

— reapply my second skin — can’t stand it when your stare starts to sunburn — feel your

scrub-a-dub lub but grandma was left handed until she wasn’t — and my body knows

better how to sign signum crucis than it knows how to touch you.

VI.

VII.

VIII.

i want to be clean the way i was

before baptism.

i want to break bread and

eat until full, kneel to a new deity

in the mirror, consecrate myself in

my own desire.

i want you to scrub this dirt from

under my nails,

want you to wash me from

myself, feel the swell                          the break

against my skin.

i want to retrain my body to

touch you the same way i

hailed mary: muscle memory.

you love me like they said He

would, and i love you like i

love my dog.

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Margo Moceyunas is a poet born and raised in California, currently located in Arizona where she attends graduate school for her PhD in Astronomy and Planetary Science. Her poetic belief is that in the act of writing a poem about something, we inherently place more meaning on it than it has at its face value. Her poetry often centers around love, dogs, and the ways in which we inherit how to love.