"Exercise in Negation"

Exercise in Negation

—after K. Iver

Marissa Davis

It is not winter. There is no dog. No dogs, no daughters. No— there has to be a daughter. But no dog. No winter. No backyard, no broken back door slamming. The door glides tactfully, with immense discretion, ideal for a house

decanting lies. But this house has none. Or it does, and she doesn’t

know them. The daughter. The daughter, who has never spoken a word in her life, not even her own name. In perfect silence, nothing breaks. Not a door, not a marriage, not a family, not a crabapple branch gagged by frost. There is no frost. No winter. High summer, a backyard—fine—a backyard achingly alive, a loud wet sun, the subtropics’ raving Janus face. A climate leaking the precarity of fiction: a slice of raw wind, a season that never mattered. Any season, the teen deer amble in the ragged woodline, stitch the pines’ blue shadows with their mothers. (Where is her—) If she went outside, the dog would chase them.

If she went outside, he would follow her.

Her father. His gravitational fury. There is no dog,

I’ve promised this. No dogs, no broken doors creaking confessions. No adolescent tongues unspooling sins. If there were sins, she wouldn’t know them, the daughter, genteel & tongueless, toothless, sitting indoors because there is no dog needing out, sitting indoors by the window, watching the cardinals fuck, blood clots in the magnolia boughs.