Animals: Three Poems by Ruth Awad

How to Lucid Dream

My dead dogs float
like dandelion seeds to be near me, 

their faces on my face, one miraculous
beast. In the beginning there was something 

more than humans. God existed alone 
in eternity and said, “Be.”

On Wednesday, there were angels. 
On Thursday, the jinn. 

The world rests on the back of a bull, the fin of a fish. 
It explains the stampeding and swimming. 

Here my love
is unfamiliar. Push a finger

through my palm. 
Behold my feral face in the mirror.

This is where the wind comes from: between
sleep and wake

where the dead are not really dead. 
An eternity of almost touching.

The Only World in Which the Dog Lives

Is in correspondence with the representatives of BarkBox: Did Bowie enjoy the lamb jerky? And so I lie
like I’ve been asked something important: she pawed my calf for more! She climbed into the box like a
Christmas card. She soared through the air like a trapeze artist! Can you believe it? My Bowie.
Marching through the summer grass up to her neck! Sun-footing through the brambles and the ivy!
Little solar flare bear in her hibernation sweater. You should see the snow on her fur – it almost
sparkled. A feather in her mouth, a flock. Brought the wind with her, too. The whole house storming,
fur tumbleweeding down the hallway. Yes, her favorite toys are small and yellow. Yes, I did know dogs
can see the color yellow. Yes, it is unhinged to pretend like this. Yes, I can hold.

The Jinn Who Loved Me

My shadow came to me on horseback, gold

and hair like smoke. I am your jinn,

you are my sha’ir. So we were bound

together. When heaven split apart, we were red

like dregs of oil, we blinked like cattle

shoved into the daylight,

the knife swift and yet to come.

About Ruth Awad

Ruth Awad is a 2021 NEA Poetry Fellow and the author of Set to Music a Wildfire (Southern Indiana Review Press, 2017), winner of the 2016 Michael Waters Poetry Prize and the 2018 Ohioana Book Award for Poetry. Alongside Rachel Mennies, she is the co-editor of The Familiar Wild: On Dogs & Poetry (Sundress Publications, 2020). She is the recipient of a 2020 and 2016 Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award. Her work appears in Poetry, Poem-a-Day, The Believer, The New Republic, Kenyon Review, Pleiades, The Missouri Review, and elsewhere.