Let me tell you a story:
up the holler lived a brown dog
who loved biting tires. One day,
a tire bit him back. Imagine—running
and then the sound of crunch
on bone, the final asphalt moment
of its dawning realization.
Three-legged now,
wary, the dog sits, dreams
of tires on his shaded porch, wiser
now to love and all its language
of wanting.
SHAUN TURNER serves as fiction editor for Stirring: A Literary Collection and co-editor at Fire Poetry Journal. He is the author of The Lawless River: Stories (Red Bird Chapbooks). His writing has been selected as a finalist in Best Small Fictions 2018, and can found in Reservoir Journal, as well as in the Fourth River, New South, and Appalachian Heritage, among others. Shaun earned his MFA at West Virginia University.