I forget the name of the dog upstairs.
His owner never fails with mine.
Maybe it’s her hobby to remember,
the way children learn cars or airplanes.
A husband beat her, she told me
out of nowhere.
Just like that.
Only last spring, the arid season
they call spring here, the dog's owner lived
with someone.
Fiancé, she called him. An old-fashioned
word, or maybe it's a new fashion.
Everything's new here,
fresh from ruins.
I was out for a run, she says a year later,
Then he was gone, just like that.
Just like that, I repeat, and
I miss the weather, the early frost,
the too-hot summers, everything.
I copy her San Francisco laughter,
like we're recycling a dead joke. The animal
moans as if he knows the unspoken,
as if he’s a million dog years,
old as I am, tired of all this sunlight.
His owner bears him up the stairs.
The two are one flight above
where we once slept.
We get scared, I hear her,
We get scared.
About the Poet:
Carla Sarett’s latest poetry chapbook, ANY EXCUSE FOR A PARTY (2025) is out from Bainbridge Island Press. Her work has been nominated for Best Amerian Essays, Best of the Net, the Pushcart Prize and Best Microfictions. Carla serves as Contributing Editor for New Verse Review and earned her PhD at University of Pennsylvania. She is currently based in San Francisco.
Ephemeral Elegies 
Exquisite! This poem has such a quiet ache to it. Nothing is overexplained, which somehow makes it land harder. The repeated “just like that” feels so true to the way life can change without asking permission first. One minute everything has a shape, and the next minute you’re standing in the same sunlight with something missing.
I was especially struck by the dog moaning “as if he knows the unspoken.” Sometimes animals seem to notice sorrow before people know what to do with it. There’s something tender about that image of her carrying him upstairs, both of them still going on, even after fear and loss have settled into the ordinary parts of life.
“We get scared” is such a simple ending, but it feels honest. Not dramatic. Just human.
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