“Ghost Dog” by Roxanna Bennett
Poetry Pause is the League of Canadian Poets’ daily poetry dispatch. Read “Ghost Dog” by Roxanna Bennett.
Ghost Dog
By Roxanna Bennett
He said, take your I out of the poem,
watch it. Object the words, a locked
box. She said, where are you? I don’t
see you in here, and opened the door
to let the dog out.
(Insert that song here).
An I for an eye.
Who would you be without
the word, and I have been subject
to my own objective which is to be other
and loved. I do not live in the line but watch.
He said nothing of You and how You dominate
the form.
Where’s the dog?
The black dog, the ghost dog,
the dog with the wandering eye.
An assassin or at least able to enforce
a no, or assert a yes. The sword and the honour
is the same dog that ends in the ice cream truck
with a lost ball, last book, at least it would have meant
something. More than an exercise in rights, of relinquishing,
more than.
Change prince to princess or not.
I’m experiencing a moment by which
I mean a year that I will later regret not
having written about. I never remember who
I was on which medication, don’t know if my vision
is side effect or symptom.
I’m always the smartest person in the room depending
on the room which is half of why I never leave the house.
I don’t know grammar, who is this Walter Benjamin, how much
time is messianic? And your lexicon, your indexical, as he says,
elegy. She said, I don’t see you. In here.
Of all these subjects dog and elegy are the only words I understand.
Copyright © Roxanna Bennett
Previously published in Arc Magazine. First appeared in Poetry Pause on August 24, 2020.
Roxanna Bennett is the author of Uncomfortability (Gordon Hill Press, 2023), The Suspect We with Shane Neilson (Palimpsest Press, 2023) The Untranslatable I (Gordon Hill Press, 2021), Unbecoming Prophecy with Khashayar Mohammadi (chapbook, Collusion Books, 2022) and Unmeaningable (Gordon Hill Press, 2019).
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