I Brought a Leash to a Knife Fight
by @Kiernan515
I kept praying to a god I was older than.
I couldn’t tell if I was lonely
or just in a poem again.
And still I was kneeling to something
that never knelt back.
God sent the dog.
Or maybe He was the dog.
I haven’t decided which makes more sense.
Both feel like the universe testing
how much of me it meant to take.
Everyone says I am lucky.
No one says
what for.
I guess the bar for luck is
outliving a moment
that never unclenched.
Some nights the girl who didn’t survive
sits at the edge of my bed
asking if I remember the eyes,
the silence,
the moment the world chose me
and I didn’t choose back.
She wants to know why I keep pretending
that we didn’t switch places.
There is a version of this story
where I die.
Everyone bitten carries that version.
I lived.
The dog didn’t.
Some days survival tastes like theft.
Some nights the scar glows red
like a blood moon,
like memory is a tide
I never learned to swim,
just doggy-paddle and tread-dread
through looping summers and scar tissue,
and the water still rises
even when I don’t.
Trauma is a trapdoor disguised as a second.
One moment you are bending down.
The next you are breathing
around a memory
with its jaw still locked.
Sudden light looks too much like teeth
learning my name,
and my skin tightens
like it remembers being held
by something holy and hungry.
People call it healing
only because they stopped looking.
But me and the dog know
it is a debt.
Every night I pay it
by touching the quiet,
by choosing myself again
to stay alive
in the house the fear built
with nothing but my shaking hands
and the leash
I brought
to a knife fight.