My first dog won’t squeeze through a door mostly closed.
She presses her face to the gap and she cries
and alights back and forth on her small dancing toes
and implores with her liquid-dark teddy bear eyes
that a different creature might clear her a path,
for her two-stepping joints never learned to oppose.
My superior thumbs let her into the bath
where she sits ‘tween my knees and she kisses my nose.
My second dog wedges her way without shame
beyond every new door that a lock doesn’t catch,
drawing near with her warm toasted marshmallow frame,
bravely baring her belly, demanding a scratch.
She has crawled under fences and climbed over gates
and gone walking alone through the sun-bitten streets.
She has scaled kitchen counters to empty full plates
and routinely tracks mud into newly-washed sheets.
It must be the year that she spent on her own
in a loud, crowded shelter that taught her to prize
all the space she can make in a world I have known
to be cruelest to creatures of much lesser size.
My first dog wakes nightly to every sharp creak
of the settling house or the wind’s wistful sigh
and with fur stuck absurdly in sleep-molded peaks,
she growls into the darkness and narrows her eyes.
My second dog stirs only when I reach out,
press my palm to her chest. I ensure she’s alive
with my fingers splayed, searching, in front of her mouth
for the heat of her breath while I feel her ribs rise.
I do not often sleep with both dogs in the bed,
as nice as it is to have each at my knee.
I do not often sleep. I get stuck in my head
and I wonder who’ll open the door up for me?