CW: disordered eating, vomiting

I’m afraid of dogs

because they trek dirt across the hardwood
and carry a foul stench on their backs; because
they growl and gnaw of their own accord.

Their presence feels invasive, unclean: bodies
in my space but beyond my control. To care for
a creature who hurts me without meaning to

is a tenderness I can’t stomach; to hurt
a creature who doesn’t understand its own pain
is an impulse I can’t escape. I never learn

that I am also a body, impossible to purge
of its blood and bile and bone no matter how far
I plunge my fingers down my throat. After I die

some dog, somewhere, will hold me in its teeth
and weep as if it loved me, its grief made tangible
as it turns death to sustenance. I take stock

of the inevitabilities, each one more terrifying
than the last, and I patch them together,
weaving in and out with deliberate strokes.

When I was a child, my mother used to thread
the needle for me; my hands, though small,
were clumsy, uncertain of their own power.

Now her eyes are old and tired and I’m the one
to lick my index finger and squint at the aperture
and carefully, with all the precision I can muster,

pull the thread to the other side.