Juliet Cook
PAIGE
I don't remember where she came from or why
we got her. Just that she was ours and her name
was Paige. Paige was a beagle mix.
She was hyper and friendly and sweet.
She was excited when we got home
or came outside. She lived outdoors
in a caged space and homemade doghouse.
She'd jump up to the top of her house,
bark, try her best to gain our attention.
One winter night, she must have fallen down
off the top. We didn't find out until we got home,
then saw that she couldn't walk the way she used to.
Her back legs were paralyzed.
The top of her house had grown icy,
but we didn't know and neither did she
until it was too late. Now she couldn't move
her back legs without dragging them behind her.
Was her injury our fault? Why did we keep her
outside in the winter? What were we thinking
or not thinking? And by "we" I mean the adults
who made the decisions. I was one of the kids.
Paige was my first dog, but she wasn't really mine.
She wasn't a doll or a toy or a game kept indoors
and maybe I thought she was supposed to stay
outside, regardless of the weather.
Or it just didn't cross my mind at the time,
because that's where she always was.
Even when it was cold, stormy, thundering,
lightning, snowy, icy, or in the midst of a blizzard.
Until after she slid and crashed down off the top.
Then we moved her inside. She temporarily lived
in that space in between our back door and the laundry
machines. We kept the surrounding doors shut
because she couldn't control her own bowels anymore.
She still seemed friendly and happy to see us though.
She would stretch herself towards us with her front legs,
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dragging those back legs on the floor.
She didn't whimper. She didn't cry.
But her back legs deteriorated and shrunk
and our next door neighbor offered to shoot her.
(This poem was originally inspired by the poem "JAKE" by M.J. Arcangelini, which appeared in Cataloguing Poetry and then this poem also expanded into two additional interconnected poems. Thank you very much to M.J. Arcangelini.)
PAIGE TWO
Maybe I remember things incorrectly
or am missing some of the details,
but in my mind
our dog Paige was just a different version of herself
despite her disability/inability to move her back legs
the way she used to. It was harder for her to accomplish
certain things that used to seem easy or come naturally,
but she still seemed happy. Maybe I'm wrong.
Because why would our next door neighbor offer to shoot her
if she was still happy?
Maybe the physical trauma from the fall was escalating,
but I still wanted to keep her alive. I begged
for her to live, but that choice wasn't mine to make.
We declined the offer to have Paige shot,
but paid to have her put to sleep.
Maybe it was so that she wouldn't die in pain.
Maybe it was to keep her uncontrolled bowels
and other debris from soiling the indoor carpeting
or littering the floors. Even though she was contained
in one indoor space, maybe she was still contaminating
our whole home or might make one of us sick.
Maybe she just wasn't meant to be a house dog.
PAIGE THREE
After I had my stroke, our next door neighbor offered to shoot me.
Maybe I just wasn't meant to have word issues or seizures.
I do have to concentrate to get certain words right,
such as colors. It's red. It's a mild form of Aphasia.
But I can still walk. I can still read. I can still write
and think for myself and speak for myself.
I relearned how to rearrange what I had lost.
I still forget certain words sometimes
or maybe it's a misperception or maybe it's all a dream.
In one of my recent dreams, pets who misbehaved
were cut in half like they were part of an evil
carnival sideshow. Their skin was sliced off.
They were dissected to teach us a lesson,
but what was the lesson?
That we should all be the same?
Do as we're told? Stay in one place
the way we were initially taught
or conditioned or positioned?
Even if we change?
Deteriorating Words
Old paint peeling from the ceiling and
landing on the floor. An outdated song
you don't like keeps playing inside your head
on repeat, whether you're awake or asleep
or at least trying to fall asleep in bed
or hiding underneath the bed and why in the hell
is your head stuck somewhere you don't want
it to be? It feels like you're spinning
the bottle until it breaks. Then gagging
bloody shards of glass out of your own mouth.
Then the parasitic afterbirth will crawl back inside you
for a feast, to remove the rest of you.
Now you're in the passenger seat, all the billboards
drenched with blood and bad dream scenes
from your past. You can't see the driver, but
he's in control of the vehicle. He tells you to rip apart
all your pieces of paper, throw them out the window.
All you can see is tiny bits of separated letters
flying backwards, flying away, landing on road kill.
An abandoned kitten being devoured and spit out and you
can't save it. Your sense of direction is a mess, you'll never
retrieve yourself. You don't even know where you are anymore
or how you got here. Your words are gone.
Stuck inside another abandoned mix tape.
Windmills Flying Away
Grandma liked reading obituaries,
now she's stuck inside one.
Chipped chopped ham
sizzled on her stove.
Each batch was followed
by windmill cookies,
which would soon disappear
down our throats,
but stayed stuck in my brain.
Processed meat
can become processed memories.
Everyone processes differently
and who knows what is real?
Someone grabbed the windmill
out of Grandma's front yard, shoved it in
their truck bed and drove away.
I have no idea where it is now.
No desire to quickly seize up
anything out of anyone else's space,
unless it was personally offered to me.
But we all have our own way of processing.
Our own memoires. Real or not, I remember
the windmill cookies inside her home
and how she's the one who introduced me
to black raspberry ice cream,
with homemade whipped cream on top,
quickly melting away...
Juliet Cook's poetry has appeared in a multitude of literary publications. She is the author of numerous poetry chapbooks, most recently including "red flames burning out" (Grey Book Press, 2023), "Contorted Doom Conveyor" (Gutter Snob Books, 2023), "Your Mouth is Moving Backwards" (Ethel Zine & Micro Press, 2023), "REVOLTING" (Cul-de-sac of Blood, 2024), and "Blue Stingers Instead of Wings" (Pure Sleeze Press, 2025). Her most recent full-length poetry book, "Malformed Confetti" was published by Crisis Chronicles Press. You can find out more at Juliet Cook'
