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Obedience School
Near the end, the experts on loss
sold us a robot dog that barked
and leaned into the touch
to give comfort to my blind dying
mother. She wasn’t fooled enough
to name it—or gone enough,
though she was pretty gone
then. We put it in her hands
and she stroked it
then hurled it across the room.
Nothing to lose is never true.
Always something more to lose.
I turned the dog off.
Bad dog, I said.
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Jim Daniels‘ most recent collection of poems is Gun/Shy, Wayne State University Press. He has published many collections of fiction; written four produced screenplays; and his collection of essays, An Ignorance of Trees, is forthcoming from Cornerstone Press in 2025. He has edited or co-edited six anthologies, most recently RESPECT: The Poetry of Detroit Music. He is a recipient of two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and two from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. A native of Detroit, he lives in Pittsburgh and currently teaches in the Alma College low-residency MFA Program.
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Paul Strand, Blind Woman, photogravure, 1912, The J. Paul Getty Museum