Good Boys
If queried that balmy morning
as to my mood while walking
through the farmers market,
I might have answered with
a sixty-year-old man’s straight-
faced certitude that life
as I understood it was rich
with earthly delights, many
right there within arm’s reach,
and for now all the wrongs
of this shit world were, more
or less, forgiven. That was before
I spied the dogs that mauled you
in suburban Austin the previous fall.
Not the actual beasts of our terrible
new family lore—those dogs
were long gone, Texas-toast,
put down the morning after
(surely not remembering what,
if anything, they had done,
and therefore absent any of the cute
bad-dog shame that sometimes,
briefly, helps)—but like so many
of memory’s blunt force objects,
the trigger was the trauma
all over again. So I sidled up
to the dogs’ owner, who evidently
shared my interest in farmers
market pottery. My opening gambit
was to keep my enemy close,
praise the dogs’ docile nature,
their ballet-like forte for fitting
so much wooly flesh into a pottery stall
without breaking anything. “Good
boys,” the man beamed. “Best dogs
I ever had.” I veiled my rage
by fondling a mug with a blue
sunflower that had your name
written all over it. I couldn’t tell you
then (or now) what I’d expected
from the encounter. But for some time
I tracked the man and his hounds
through that busy market at a careful,
gumshoe distance. Watching, waiting—
I could only surmise—for some
horrific act I might, this time, thwart.
Afterward, trying hard to settle
myself, I looked down at the sun-
flower mug in my hand. A gift
for you, purchased out of fatherly love,
it’s true, but also out of the same
untold munificence I’d felt
earlier that morning, now
washing over me again like some
returning tide of tender feelings
for just about everyone I’d ever known.
Even—who can say why?—for every
man’s dog I’d ever seen devour
its own retch or lick its nether regions.
For every good boy I’d ever watched
wagging its comical tail at this shit world.
© Jon Ballard
Jon Ballard is a Michigan-based author of two poetry collections, Where It Hurts (Kelsay Books, 2025) and Possible Lives (Kelsay Books, 2020), and a novel, Year of the Poets (Loose Leaves Publishing, 2014). His work has appeared in Cimarron Review, DMQ Review, Connecticut River Review, Midwest Review, Great Lakes Review, and Pictura Journal.
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