To conclude their experience interning for The Southeast Review, Diana Calderón, Arissa Cushnie, and Grant Wendt searched the archives for covers and writings they thought best represented SER before we changed our name. The following pieces are from our years as SUN DOG.

From SUN DOG, Vol. 5, 1983

"Blowing Up"

by Barbara Hamby

Tonight she was going to blow the whole place, herself included, straight to hell. Dynamite. “I nee...

At their first meeting, my first boyfriend asks my father "what was prison like?"

When my boyfriend touches me,

I feel the wings of my pussy flutter

in time with my breath—I kneel

between his legs in his laundry room

while his mother drinks white wine

in the living room, and feel myself

holy when I am so wholly for his pleasure—

This is a love story about my boyfriend’s

laundry room and my Laundromat,

the SUV his parents buy him and my...

Aubade with Wind Chimes and Hesitation

Head tucked between the pillow and its ragged blue case,

the dog snores more softly now. We fell asleep

sometime past ten. At some point, their dog

came in too, nuzzling between us,

so that our bodies were only a dog’s length apart.

They could have left at some point, but didn’t.

I woke up around six and, surprised to find them there still—

arm draped across the dog, towards me, almost touching

it...

Flamingos

As the nurses pushed your bed into the OR,
you extended your arms toward us, & we promised
we’d take you to see the flamingos
in the hospital garden downstairs.
When you woke up, you refused to pee
on the diaper underneath you (you’d been potty-trained
for months), so we brought the bedpan & explained
you couldn’t walk yet, but soon. I learnt
to listen to your monitor in my sleep.
The worried aren’t supposed to be hun...

A Dark Bird

There is no right answer to how a young girl finds a home.

Sometimes, she marvels at the swift larks

or names the crows after their shadows.

I have been a dark bird with a compass in her throat,

flock searching. I have been a young girl looking for something to love

that did not strike fire to her skin.

My body symmetries two landscapes,

two countries to which I don’t entirely belong: I have lived next to sprigs

of wheat fo...

The Only Confession

I did something wrong I carved a name

into a tree and it wasn’t even mine

the name belonged to someone

I used to love the tree

belonged to no one at all

and I wept as soon as I dug in

the knife how hard I tried to make

the vowels sing but the old tree

said nothing it was both witness

and victim it was one of those trees

with too many hearts too many

couples leaving so cruelly

their initials I believe in a poem

there’s ro...

The Sun, the Ship

      the sun shone

as it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen

something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,

had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

                        Auden, “Musée des Beaux Arts”

...

Two Poets Email on a Sunday Afternoon

I used to think what happened to me / massive creature & putrid / pinned to the floor, ripped open, a man

inside my belly / was the exception / some House members believe this God’s will / brutalizing a little girl is

God’s will / but the more I read contemporary poetry / the Truths cover me / pelt of Bear, her fur thick & warm

/ my savior, my solace, memory re-created to favor dearness / as...

Teething Borders

“Borders are set up to define the places that are safe and unsafe, to distinguish us from them. A border is a dividing line, a narrow strip along a steep edge. A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. It is in a constant state of transition. The prohibited and forbidden are its inhabitants.”

—Gloria Anzaldúa

Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza...

Sexting

You say words work when hands can’t

reach. So I try, send you messages

that set a scene: the tool shed out back,

windows steamed, wood grain

from the work table pressing patterns

into my bare thighs. You write back:

We’d knock over the bag of seed for songbirds,

use the foot stool to get a better angle, grab

the twine to bind us. I tell you

the next door neighbor, pruning her shrubs,

might hear us faintly, might think us

an exotic...