From aracelis girmay’s “The Dog”

In a poem from LARB Quarterly no. 46: “Alien,” aracelis girmay encounters the self as a wild animal.

By aracelis girmayOctober 7, 2025

• LARB Lit

• Poetry

This poem is a preview of the LARB Quarterly, no. 46: Alien. Become a member for more fiction, essays, criticism, poetry, and art from this issue—plus the next four issues of the Quarterly in print.

¤

The Dog

I.

Groan out that great eye, all shouting shat
& dribbled, growing larger.
The midwives used their cloths
To shine my mirror.
Across two years the babies fell, first one
Then the other out of that obsidian, my exhalations.
Once with wires the other all free,
Each of them spinning knots in their cords.
I feared & feared, one for each one.
I had read somewhere small lines of Ingrian history
Describing a tradition of opening all the braids & knots
Of a person birthing in order to assist
With her effacement. I grew effaced. Each eye carried one wolf
& the memory came back to me from
When I worked in Bluefields one summer
Under the guidance of Doña Nidia,
Interviewing Black women community leaders
For an oral history,
& in my months there with her learning,
I sometimes passed a table,
On my way to the office, a table manned by men who sold
Glass beads & other things I can’t remember now,
But what I remember most are the dark hay-colored pelts
The color of dark hay-colored dogs,
Painted with black markings from what seemed to me to be
Shoe polish, in stripes, & when I finally asked
The men said they were the pelts of women
Who disguised themselves as wild animals
(But did they say dogs or is that just
What comes to me now?) to do their wandering & work.
& sometimes these women shed their pelts in some secret place
To become human women again
& these men stole them which meant the women could not return
To them & that in these pelts was some of the power.
They could be bought. Though I don’t remember
The men at the table
Expressing any interest in selling them to me,
Who knows why I think of this now except for
Ten years I have been inside the dog.
The night when that first labor was done
I stood at the mirror aberrating, matted,
& from one flat eye heard jackal jackal.
Who walked the perimeter, who led the dead,
Our ankles spotted with blood. & stomach’s
Black roses off of which our babies fed. Again
Contracting, purple as a lens. Subject.
Soundbroken. Dispersed onto every limb. I am not freen.
Could not lay down this skin.

¤

Featured image: “Kalila and Dimna Discussing Dimna’s Plans to Become a Confidante of the Lion,” Folio from a Kalila wa Dimna, ca. 1525–50. The Alice and Nasli Heeramaneck Collection, Gift of Alice Heeramaneck, 1981, The Metropolitan Museum of Art (1981.373.27). CC0, metmuseum.org. Accessed October 2, 2025. Image has been cropped.