Don’t Let Go
Art by Amy Marques
“Poetry is everywhere. When a fashion catalogue entitled “Poetry” and the size of many literary journals popped in my mail, I decided that it was a sign to do some visual erasures and additions and to create a “journal” of sorts.”
Amy Marques strives (with varying degrees of success) to say more using less words. More of her art and words at https://amybookwhisperer.wordpress.com.
Yard Sale, Furniture and Appliances, May 27-28, 2026
Hybrid by Bradley David Waters
CW: Mention of Death
AK got home from Alabama via Houston on Thursday. It’s hard but he likes it, he says. His drive was too long & late from the airport to our country home, but that’s my opinion. We’re so far away from things. Maybe he thought not far enough before entering the first new air of a fresh-lonely dogless house. Then setting his bags down, those kinds of arms that fall to the side with nothing to hold onto. Oh, I wouldn’t do just then. I was on the couch ruining everything. He, still on his feet, feeling out that which was being without the gentle resistance of letting her go one last time, passing her off, belly still warm, neck too limp. He had to stand there, a heavy hello without its goodbye. I just want to hate Alabama and Houston. It happened on a block seat, a hellish plinth, in pathetic sterility, but who cares about that then. I couldn’t tell you the color, but I suppose the vinyl was the leaf or fruit end of an orange. I suppose posters for immunizations and dentistry cheered ways to make puppies grow old. Now her empty sweatshirt, a mini hoodie, will serve surrogate from time on out. I’ll think she got so skinny she’s just a grain of sand in there. I think I’ll need that forever now, but I’ll leave room for becoming accustomed to the emptiness. For betraying her that way. For laughter again by visitors she would just as soon have torn their noses off. We wonder now when she was last excited to see us. There was one final wag of the tail, but it’s not on our calendar. There’s nothing around to love food so much as to homerun slide its head into a dish for. To turn a muzzle orange with mashed sweet potato, so neon strangers will ask what you’ve done to it. In bed now, the cold of clean linens, that forever spot, the warmth of pee when she let go the last time against my hip. It’s on the calendar. And the timestamp on photos from that terrible room. How could I return home only two hours later without her? That pee spot could have had the decency to stay warm while I was gone. Another nineteen years if it was decent. But no, it didn’t even leave enough of itself to blot. It was simply atmosphere, unemployed. I just wanted to hate bedding then. For how stupidly soft it let itself laze around. For that I would shuck it down to a strong lesson. Stuff the stupid mouth of the washing machine and tell it for once to do something about the noise. Go on, make some racket in this new place you dumb fumbling thing. You dumb fucking thing. And you know what? I saved the gray lint from that load. That’s the last lint isn’t it. She wasn’t the shedding kind, but maybe there’s a hair in there. And to take out the trash next. How hefting the plastic white sag of potty pads and diapers is to take the last of her body to the bin in the yard that cohorts with tin cans and coffee grounds. To drag my slip-ons against the gravel, lift the gray lid, and drop her in. Let me say, that was her last pee, her last blood, her last DNA. So if I was going to clone a million of her—and of course that was an option, you fools—that trash bag was last chance gone. In the cold clean of linens that Thursday night, AK said the quiet was too loud and asked me to turn on white noise. I should have done laundry again. I should have pulled up the carpeting and floor boards and foundation and just shoved it hard into that that slobbering electric fool. Just dare it to clean off her paw prints and I’ll fucking throw it out on the gravel. Just to dare at something big and throw it right into the river. I’ll be the bully tonight, not my grief. Well, grief gave me a hell of a wallop and AK fell asleep with honest exhaustion before I got the sound buttons on. And deserving of however deep it got him, though we don’t talk deserving in this house. People don’t deserve or not deserve, or we can’t let ourselves succumb to that. And then to sleep through my writhing. To sleep right on top the cut-on-the-dotted-lines silhouette of where she curled like a letter ‘C’. My noise stayed in my gut like a hot batting of peristaltic cotton. A dryer tumbling the edges of sharp cries into the rolling hill country of moans. And her cutest little color-block hoodie—everybody always said so—slipped onto my arm, a band on my bicep, the way workers keep on singing in solidarity.
AK got home from Alabama via Houston on Thursday. It’s hard but he likes it, he says. His drive was too long & late from the airport to our country home, but that’s my opinion. We’re so far away from things. Maybe he thought not far enough before entering the first new air of a fresh-lonely dogless house. Then setting his bags down, those kinds of arms that fall to the side with nothing to hold onto. Oh, I wouldn’t do just then. I was on the couch ruining everything. He, still on his feet, feeling out that which was being without the gentle resistance of letting her go one last time, passing her off, belly still warm, neck too limp. He had to stand there, a heavy hello without its goodbye. I just want to hate Alabama and Houston. It happened on a block seat, a hellish plinth, in pathetic sterility, but who cares about that then. I couldn’t tell you the color, but I suppose the vinyl was the leaf or fruit end of an orange. I suppose posters for immunizations and dentistry cheered ways to make puppies grow old. Now her empty sweatshirt, a mini hoodie, will serve surrogate from time on out. I’ll think she got so skinny she’s just a grain of sand in there. I think I’ll need that forever now, but I’ll leave room for becoming accustomed to the emptiness. For betraying her that way. For laughter again by visitors she would just as soon have torn their noses off. We wonder now when she was last excited to see us. There was one final wag of the tail, but it’s not on our calendar. There’s nothing around to love food so much as to homerun slide its head into a dish for. To turn a muzzle orange with mashed sweet potato, so neon strangers will ask what you’ve done to it. In bed now, the cold of clean linens, that forever spot, the warmth of pee when she let go the last time against my hip. It’s on the calendar. And the timestamp on photos from that terrible room. How could I return home only two hours later without her? That pee spot could have had the decency to stay warm while I was gone. Another nineteen years if it was decent. But no, it didn’t even leave enough of itself to blot. It was simply atmosphere, unemployed. I just wanted to hate bedding then. For how stupidly soft it let itself laze around. For that I would shuck it down to a strong lesson. Stuff the stupid mouth of the washing machine and tell it for once to do something about the noise. Go on, make some racket in this new place you dumb fumbling thing. You dumb fucking thing. And you know what? I saved the gray lint from that load. That’s the last lint isn’t it. She wasn’t the shedding kind, but maybe there’s a hair in there. And to take out the trash next. How hefting the plastic white sag of potty pads and diapers is to take the last of her body to the bin in the yard that cohorts with tin cans and coffee grounds. To drag my slip-ons against the gravel, lift the gray lid, and drop her in. Let me say, that was her last pee, her last blood, her last DNA. So if I was going to clone a million of her—and of course that was an option, you fools—that trash bag was last chance gone. In the cold clean of linens that Thursday night, AK said the quiet was too loud and asked me to turn on white noise. I should have done laundry again. I should have pulled up the carpeting and floor boards and foundation and just shoved it hard into that that slobbering electric fool. Just dare it to clean off her paw prints and I’ll fucking throw it out on the gravel. Just to dare at something big and throw it right into the river. I’ll be the bully tonight, not my grief. Well, grief gave me a hell of a wallop and AK fell asleep with honest exhaustion before I got the sound buttons on. And deserving of however deep it got him, though we don’t talk deserving in this house. People don’t deserve or not deserve, or we can’t let ourselves succumb to that. And then to sleep through my writhing. To sleep right on top the cut-on-the-dotted-lines silhouette of where she curled like a letter ‘C’. My noise stayed in my gut like a hot batting of peristaltic cotton. A dryer tumbling the edges of sharp cries into the rolling hill country of moans. And her cutest little color-block hoodie—everybody always said so—slipped onto my arm, a band on my bicep, the way workers keep on singing in solidarity.
Bradley David Waters is a queer California-based writer of poetics, beyond-genre, and creative nonfiction. His work appears in DIAGRAM, HAD, Denver Quarterly, and numerous other publications. He is also the senior editor of hybrid and beyond-genre works at JMWW.
Art and writing at bradley-david.com
Instagram: @bradley_david_w
Art and writing at bradley-david.com
Instagram: @bradley_david_w
