Street Dogs
Among the world’s dogs, you’ll find public dogs
napping on shop steps unconcerned. Well known
to locals (though nameless and answering
any call), they come around at meal time,
patient for scraps, like dogs in Istanbul
who claim a sunny patch on worn stones
by Hagia Sophia, and tourists
have to step around. These are not the dogs
you meet in Athens carrying lunch pails
and packed baskets, absorbed in daily tasks
assigned to them. But they know they belong.
They claim the city in the only way
a city can be owned: out on the streets,
its pungent air taken in through the nose.
Joseph Chaney teaches at Indiana University South Bend, where he directs Wolfson Press. His poems have recently appeared in South Florida Poetry Journal, The Apple Valley Review, The Journal of Humanistic Mathematics, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and The Ekphrastic Review.