Ira Joel Haber
Poem where a better last line might be simply the lawn
That yellow dog keeps
coming back at night crashing up
through the trees that mark the property line
out back coat matted and damp I hear the collar jingle
smell dead
leaves and pine needles lake water night after
night this goes on
for weeks I sit up in bed
heart thumping breathe
picture my daughter’s round cheek
the puncture marks the thin
stream of blood when she finally takes her palm
away retrieve the receipt
from the vet from the drawer turn it over
in my hand to reassure myself
in the morning I will stand bare-
foot on cold cement sweep the front porch
clean
of pine needles bits of dry leaves shake off
the welcome mat
brush tufts
of yellow hair from the floral cushions
ignore the long dog–
shaped shadows that follow me across
the darkened blades of glistening grass.
Susan Barry-Schulz grew up just outside of Buffalo, New York. She is a licensed physical therapist living with chronic illness and an advocate for mental health and reducing stigma in IBD. Her poetry has appeared in The Wild World, New Verse News, SWWIM, Barrelhouse online, Nightingale & Sparrow, Shooter Literary Magazine, Kissing Dynamite, Bending Genres and elsewhere. She lives in a lake neighborhood in the Hudson Valley region with her husband and one or more of her three adult children. It all depends.
Ira Joel Haber was born and lives in Brooklyn. He is a sculptor, painter, writer, book dealer, photographer and teacher. His work has been seen in numerous group shows both in the USA and Europe and he has had 9 one man shows including several retrospectives of his sculpture. His work is in the collections of The Whitney Museum Of American Art, New York University, The Guggenheim Museum, The Hirshhorn Museum,The Albright-Knox Art Gallery & The Allen Memorial Art Museum. Since 2006 His paintings, drawings, photographs and collages have been published in over 250 on line and print magazines. He has received three National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, two Creative Artists Public Service Grant (CAPS) two Pollock-Krasner grants, two Adolph Gottlieb Foundation grants and, in 2010, he received a grant from Artists’ Fellowship Inc. in 2017 & 2018 he received the Brooklyn Arts Council SU-CASA artist-in-residence grant.