Sarah folds the dead student’s poems and carries them back to the creek the student had often written about. She holds them in her hands and then burns them and drops the flaming last corner into the water. Sometimes there really is nothing left. The few ashes extinguish when they hit the water. What once were poems can no longer be identified as such.

Sarah’s father’s death left her sadder but stronger. Her mother’s death just left her. The student liked to write about the skunks he saw on his long morning walks. He said he liked to stay up through the night, into the morning; he said that was the only way he liked to experience the sunrise. 

He once compared the stroke of midnight to the stripe of a skunk’s back, poised. He once claimed to have eaten skunk six different ways in six western states. He once claimed to have lied about many things he said in his poems, after Sarah got worried and started asking.

Sometimes the fire goes out before the fuel is gone. Sarah has burned her fingers holding so close the papers she has had to let go of. This is the only student Sarah has lost, though he is not the only student who has died. The night is blackest when still it can be divided by the light. 

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Sarah made little dots on her arm with the brown permanent marker she found in her sister’s desk. Her sister was away: out of the country: possibly with a man: it was all very hard to follow. The call was sudden—the gratitude great.

Sarah tried writing poems while the children slept, except she wasn’t sure the children were asleep. On her arm she tried as hard as she could to make the dots appear random. But were they random? No one had met this man her sister pretended did not exist. Sarah sometimes cautions her students that people do not try to indicate how they feel; instead, they try not to indicate how they feel—or they try to indicate how they do not feel.

The niece seemed perfectly at peace. The nephew said he wanted to cut somebody’s fucking throat. Sarah did not respond for some time, and when he asked, in a perfectly polite and measured tone, if he could please have a little bit more butter for his second and then third dinner rolls, Sarah said, Yes, dear, of course you may. 

Do you think our mother is coming back, the niece asked Sarah. Do you think our mother is coming back, Sarah had often asked herself. Sarah’s sister did come back, though neither the man nor her story came back with her. Something was missing, but something, too, had been restored. She was happy, and her arms and legs were tan, and she wore on her face far too much lipstick, which when she smiled made her look like the kind of wound she had left to escape.

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Sarah does not like not liking the girl two blocks down with the big dog and the curly hair, who seems, like her dog, not to be socialized very well, who, like the dog, will sometimes come up and put her big paws on Sarah and take the dress she is wearing by the hem and say, Oh, I just love your dress; Where did you get it; Do you know how they put the little prints on the fabric like that; I watched a video that explained it once, but I’ve forgotten all about it.

So Sarah does not walk some times of day or night—not for fear of the girl but for fear of the feeling she has about the girl, a feeling she dislikes more than she dislikes the girl herself, the girl who, through no one’s fault (except maybe her parents’), walks a little awkwardly and talks a little awkwardly and has what is perhaps no more awkward a relationship with her dog than Sarah has had with any human she has ever known.

Oh my god, you should get a dog, the girl says one day when Sarah cannot avoid her. Sarah cannot say she has never thought about getting a dog. She cannot say she has never thought about having the girl’s dog. She cannot say she has never thought about having the girl herself, how she would train her, what kind of long walks they would take together (and where), what kinds of poems the girl would come to write, how all of this nonsense about the dog might reveal itself to be some projection of her relationship with a parental figure, which Sarah might then have to be considered, which Sarah in her own poems would then have to confront, which Sarah doesn’t want to do, so Sarah stays inside and thinks bad things about the girl as she passes, smiling and waving through the big window, secretly hoping the dog may one day get loose and go free.

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Brendan Todt lives in Sioux City, Iowa. His poem “Because the Living May Be Worth Something, Too” was selected as a Best of the Net nominee by Ekphrastic Review. He won the 2021 Juxtaprose Poetry prize. He teaches creative writing at Morningside University.