December 2024 - Everything is Balance
Welcome to the December 2024 issue of Dog Throat Journal. Once more, we have a lovely variety of work from around the world. This issue includes work from: Ann Thornfield-Long, CS Crowe, Howie Good, Jeff Burt, M F Drummy, Mercedes Lawry, Mike Wilson, Patrick Cahill, Peter Cashorali, Roberta Feins, Sarah Rohrs, and Thomas Zimmerman.
Also, In a beautiful visual appearance, we have cover art by Ron Walker.
Take a look, enjoy, and drop a comment on the pieces. Authors love to hear how others react to their work.
Many thanks to all! Victor David
Issue title by Peter Cashorali
And They Gathered
by CS Crowe
When they tore down the playground behind the gymnasium to make room for a new parking lot and the deep bowl of a holding pond, we, the sons and the daughters of the deacons, did not mind. We played on the slopes until our feet wore the centipede grass down to canyons of rain-slick clay. We wrestled in the grass, until we knew each anthill by name.
When it rained, we could not tell the difference between the pool of tepid water gathering in the pit and the smooth asphalt polished by oily water; both, a perfect mirror of the sky in obsidian.
It was just another day when you ran too fast to see where asphalt ended and water began. Stitches and staples blossomed on a concrete curb. You stared up at cloudy skies while we screamed—not...
Coming to Terms
by Mercedes Lawry
Plenty of ways she walks toward forgiveness, the evening pink, layered and still. She feels the trap of time, the sorting of past and present. Intention is often masked, the mask a farce or a lie. She was far from the harm she’d done, willing it to false memory, allowing herself the even breathing that permitted sleep. An arrangement of lives, like...
equinox
by Thomas Zimmerman
a rainy dogwalk after two dry weeks so coats and pants all wet laid out like corpses in the entryway.
keep thinking of our ornamental maple dead i killed it with a pruning too enthusiastic this past spring you don’t agree.
but now it’s football season stretched out on the sofa book of poems...
Death Valley 2
by Peter Cashorali
A man who’s come back from the dead warns you that he may be a hallucination. This makes him seem very reliable. He tells you everything is balance, that there is an ancient network of trading posts where records of all our transactions are kept alive forever. He’s in summer school right now. There were classes...
Windows
by Patrick Cahill
A dirt road enters a growth of trees. Beyond the trees an invisible fire scorches the sky. Just off the road a small windowless house trails a path of dust from road to boarded door, dust a memory of recent movement, toward the troubled woods or away from them, or toward the door. We lived in the house—didn’t we?—you in your sweats and me in my jeans and cutoff sleeves, often went to what we called the grove back then, lay beneath the leaves still...
The King and the Pope
by Mike Wilson
The King stands, unmoored, in a pool of blue light beneath the stained-glass chapel window. At his feet lies the body of the Pope, the King’s dagger wedged in his gut as a red pool of blood slowly crosses the floor, inching towards the King’s feet. A king can do anything – that’s what it means to be king. A king can wage wars and ravage entire countries. A king can...
Delirium--Hands
by Jeff Burt
His hands were like oars, paddles, things to make kayaks and canoes move through rivers, his fingers were not separate but joined, webbed, of a single construct with the palms, thumbs like feathers, like fronds fallen from a fan, the old woman at the Chinese market waving a hand in front of her face bartering over the price of a chicken, Latina at Saturday mass in the hot evening of summer dithering it before her face covered with lace and her eyes...
Night in Seattle
by Sarah Rohrs
Singular white feathers, singular notes of their cries above a city street that blend sharply as they pass across the sky. Circling and crying. Circling. Soaring. Crying. Crying. We are not sleeping - the seagulls, the junkies in the parking lot with just one car, and me under a cover but not yet motel cold. No thanks to the sleep of the tortured souls turned away from the church down the block and the angels locked up for the night. Someone drags a suitcase on a sidewalk....
After Yes
by Ann Thornfield-Long
What comes after saying yes is how although I go to why more often did I do the right thing is there a right thing did I really want blue the green was pretty will I be able to make the payments provide the upkeep make sure my investment is sound should I have said let me think about it some more maybe yes but not now what if it doesn't hold...
I Am a Gold Coin
by Roberta Feins
After Orhan Pamuk My Name is Red
1. A Gold Coin
Once you admit another, all is known: names the men in my head call me.
I was the right consistency, but I still contained sediment.
The blind Persian master’s account of how to draw two-hundred-and-seventy-two horses is found in the book “The Flow of Horses”.
A garden fork is the right consistency for drawing a thick mane.
For years, I dug up things...
Tweed
by M F Drummy
Partial to it, she decides to wear it to their wedding. A smart grey blazer from the thrift store. Conservative, her hair fades into it. Wire rimmed glasses, loose slacks, sandals. The Writer. A Lyft up the hill, alone. In the parking lot some people think they recognize her. Waves, nods, gossip.
summer breeze
quivering monarch
on the hot asphalt
An outdoor ceremony next to a golden creek, the stream low, dusk....
Middle of the Night
by Howie Good
A Facebook “friend,” a painter, loved paint so much that he drank a jar of it. It was a strange time for me, too. I had to cancel the adult ed course I was scheduled to teach, “Are You Really an Ethical Person?”, when Franz Kafka appeared to me. “To destroy is to exist,” he exulted as he burned unpublished manuscripts...