DREAMS (Flightless Birds and Other Endangered Species)

When I finally flew home they’d started calling you by your real name

again. Our dog was dead but you’d bought a new one. He was bigger,

younger, with muscle in all the right places like a dealership pickup truck

but you loved him less because he didn’t bite. Now sometimes

when you drink too much you call him by the dead dog’s name; you shout 

It at him like a curse word echoing into a canyon. Then you’re angry

he doesn’t understand, livid when he doesn’t come

sleep at our feet in your bed. Lately, I spend my nights trying

to unspeak the poem about your hands. I haven’t written a word

with meaning in more than a year—I just keep releasing old poems into air like bats

dressed as blackbirds, hoping some stranger will shoot them

down and they’ll fall like manna or ash at my feet. You sleep with a gun

but I’ve only see you use it in my dreams. Last night,

you drove two hollow bullets straight through my shoulders,

sewed up my arms and named them wings. I call these things

nightmares, but you christened my hip bones your homing pigeons

and insisted we title them dreams.

Rachel Peach Leonard is a freelance writer who studied creative writing at Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis. Her poetry has found homes in journals like the Indianapolis Review, Occulum, the Rising Phoenix Review, and others. You can find her on Twitter (@rachelpeachleonard).