• Skip to main content
  • Skip to secondary navigation
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Painted Bride Quarterly

  • About
    • About PBQ
    • People
  • Issues
    • Current Issue
    • Past Issues
    • Print Annuals
  • Podcast
    • Latest Podcast
    • All Podcasts
  • News & Events
  • Submit
  • Shop
  • Fiction
  • Poetry
  • Prose
  • Contributors
  • Current Issue

Katie Brunero: The Dry Season

June 7, 2020 by PBQ Leave a Comment

Outside Mombasa,

in a hut breezy with banana wind

a boy curls on hard dirt

stroking the chest of his dog.

Her fur brushes free in clumps

and she shivers like his father

though she’s not old or lame.

The boy’s cousin heaves her

into the bed

of a rented pickup.

She cannot stay,

her sickness might spread, his father had said.

The boy will miss how she smells

like the white blood of milkweed.

The cousin drives

over roads that were riverbeds

two week before—now

all stones, some large as cow heads.

The boy’s window is broken open,

but he enjoys the speed

past boundaries marked by prickly pear.

When they pull onto the sand,

waves fold over one another

stretching almost forever.

His dog yelps when they lift her.

He swallows and the cousin says yes,

we will miss her, but the boy is thinking

of his father, the way he whimpers

sleeping against the cow fence

like a plastic bottle rolled in by the wind.

Filed Under: Issue 100, Poetry 100 Tagged With: Katie Brunero

Reader Interactions

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Primary Sidebar

Recent News & Events

PBQ @ AWP!

PBQ Poet’s Publishing Premier: Carlos Andrés Gómez’s Fractures

Issue 100 Has Arrived!

Temporarily Closing Submissions

PBQ presents: Slam Bam Reboot

© 2020 Painted Bride Quarterly. Contact PBQ: info@pbqmag.org