Is this your dog?

~Citizen App, July 23, 2025, Seattle


My love has stress cardiomyopathy—broken
heart syndrome. Grief inflames his body.
My body burns when I drink too much.
I have been drinking too much lately. Lately,
I’ve gone looking for lost dogs.
They are everywhere once you keen
your eye. Their eyes everywhere.
I’d like to think it’s only a frequency illusion—
all the dogs, roaming. The people absent.
Like a partial erasure. Or the tombstone tracings
of ancestors I once made for a great aunt.
She collected artifacts. The dogs are an artifact
of a happier time. After our dog dies, we find
the tender parts of one another—
inner arm, beneath the eye. We press
our mouths to each other’s slender wrists.
When I suck on my love’s weakened pulse,
it quickens.

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Heidi Seaborn is the author of three books of poetry: tic tic tic (2025), An Insomniac’s Slumber Party with Marilyn Monroe, Give a Girl Chaos, and three chapbooks. She’s won numerous awards including The Missouri Review Editors Prize in Poetry. She has recent work in Agni, Image, Poetry Northwest, Terrain.org, The Slowdown and elsewhere. Heidi holds degrees from Stanford and NYU and is Executive Editor of The Adroit Journal. See heidiseabornpoet.com.