How I know this is love
You call me at ten fourteen p.m. You are
walking the dog. I think: he has been
kidnapped or shot or just had a heart attack.
Or maybe it is aliens or wild dogs. Someone is
dead or he lost his shoe in a sink hole
down the street. The dog is rabid. Or maybe
the dog is the dead one. I whisper breathless.
What is wrong, are you okay. You laugh.
Everything is fine. Come outside. I take my heart
out of my throat, put it back somewhere near
my lungs. I breathe. Walk out the door.
You are standing on the lawn holding
a bag of shit and the dog leash. You say
look, look at the moon. And I do.
M. Soledad Caballero is Associate Professor of English at Allegheny College Her scholarly work focuses on British Romanticism, travel writing, post-colonial literatures, WGSS, and interdisciplinarity. She is a 2017 CantoMundo fellow, has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, a New Poet's Prize, and has been a finalist for the Missouri Review's Jeffry E. Smith poetry prize and the Mississippi Review's annual editor's prize. Her work has appeared in the Missouri Review, the Mississippi Review, the Iron Horse Literary Review, Memorius, the Crab Orchard Review, Anomaly, and other venues. She is working a manuscript titled Immigrant Confessions, which explores immigration, exile, the Chilean coup d'etat, and family dynamics, especially in relation to conceptualizations of masculinity.