cw: drugs, OD mention
E is coaxing my dog Helen 
to come out of the rain-drenched
bush where a possum 

skulks, a rabbit sleeps
till dawn. He’s asking, really,  
reasoning with her, reminding me 

this walk is the dog’s museum and she
dislikes being rushed. Today, my
ex-husband wrote to tell me I was the cause 

of our oldest’s drug OD she survived. My 

youngest fledges soon. We shop 
for shower caddies, rubber shoes. These
things happen: daughters and their

father, the things he tells them. He
speakerphones her bedroom,
slices sound my house. On the
porch, 

whisper turns wing-thrum, 
cicadas drown his words. I pitch 
my car key at the railing, shatter 

the fob. The cause. Weather  
arrives. Here’s a prayer 
for the daughters whose fathers  

call, for those whose fathers don’t.
My lithium battery skates the deck to
its edge. Daughter, daughters, when 

you try beyond all reason (don’t).
E wants Helen’s buy-in. Helen,  
you love your home, he tells her,
 
and she follows. She follows because
he is asking and in that way. Tree
bark, it’s her Rothko. Come, he asks
​  
her, and she walks into his voice.
​​Cameron Gearen's full-length collection, Some Perfect Year, came out from Shearsman Press in 2016. Her essays and poems have appeared in The Washington Post, Hippocampus, Dame Magazine, The Antioch Review, Green Mountains Review, Fence, River Styx, and many other journals. She has benefited from a Barbara Deming Money for Women grant. Former US Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky selected her chapbook for publication. She was the Hemingway Writer-in-Residence from 2017-2019. She lives in River Forest, Illinois.
header credit: Tom Barrett via Unsplash