Laura Kasischke is the author of numerous poetry collections, including Dance and Disappear, recipient of the Juniper Award; Space, in Chains, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award; and Where Now? She has received many other honors as well, including the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America and several Pushcart Prizes. Her novels include The Life before Her Eyes, which was adapted for film, and The Raising. A professor of English at the University of Michigan, Kasischke lives in Chelsea, Michigan, with her husband and son.

All My Pretty Ones

by Laura Kasischke
  for the Champions

I lied to the neighbors and to myself, yes.

Why?


I lied to my neighbors
and to the self
perhaps because no matter how
many of my pretty ones I
said your dog had killed, it
would never be as many as (roaming
loose among the lies
you also told all year, inside
my heart, and memory, and
future imaginings) your
dog has killed. I guess


a man lets loose his hounds, or he
ties up his hounds loosely. He lives


in a nice house, for a few years, blamelessly. Or


he lives in a white
house, or in my own house, and then—
People on couch
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