Sawako Nakayasu’s “Strange freedom of the dog”

The LARB Quarterly no. 45, “Submission,” presents a new poem by Sawako Nakayasu.

By Sawako NakayasuJuly 11, 2025

• LARB Lit

• Poetry

This poem is a preview of the LARB Quarterly, no. 45: Submission. Become a member for more fiction, essays, criticism, poetry, and art from this issue—plus the next four issues of the Quarterly in print.

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Strange freedom of the dog

For and with a line from Canisia Lubrin

Wends its way under a bridge. I rush to lay down the next brick, then the next, of the unfinished bridge, under the dog. What is freedom when the bridge is yet unfinished. What is a bridge with no one around to cross it. What is no one when everyone else has better options. What is an option. What is doggedness. What is a gambit. I am encouraged to choose the path of least suffering but I must get to a different land just to find out how to measure such matters, in this unique kingdom of pain. I am told that my methods of measuring no longer hold water. I am told that it is already too late for those who have drunk the water. I am told that no one is listening, no one is looking. In other words, I am strangely free as a dog, if that is the option I choose, one option out of many dogs.

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Featured image: Horace Pippin. Cabin in the Cotton, ca. 1931–37. The Art Institute of Chicago, Purchased with funds provided by Thomas F. Pick and Mary P. Hines in memory of their mother Frances W. Pick (1990.417). CC0, artic.edu. Accessed July 3, 2025. Image has been cropped.