The Dog’s Absent Bark
The neighbor’s dog across the highway and the tree line barks on and off all day. She is a big dog. Some kind of Shepherd mixed with something else, out on a chain, there in the cold. But no it isn’t that story. They bring her in when they get home from work, take her for walks. I’ve seen them. Her owners a white couple in their fifties. He is the kind of middle-aged white man with trucks and a ski mobile, maybe a fishing boat docked somewhere. But not a hunter, not out there shooting bucks with his big dog in the woods. No, and they could care better for the dog, keep it inside when it rains, though she does have a wooden house, looks like he may have made it. His garage is full of saws and such. He is that kind of man, and his wife isn’t what I’d call good looking, but she looks tall, strong, and steady. She’ll be out there in a Carhartt shirt and boots cutting wood.
This isn’t the country, we are in the suburbs, but they have a big yard. Behind the tree line on the other side of the highway, which is really just a two lane road but one you can drive forty five miles on.
I do not know their names or anything else. I do not know the dog’s name. What I witness of their lives year after year when the trees shed their leaves, or when I see them out walking the dog on the other side of the road. She is a big dog with a big voice. And I wonder what she is calling out, and how our three dogs answer, and they are all howling, despite a road and a row of trees between them. It makes it seem as if they are one pack, and makes me feel a little closer to those strangers, this man a little younger than me, as I am now old, over sixty. I wonder if we were friends would he take me on his boat, or maybe to the social club where he drinks, someplace like the Polish Falcons, or the Trinity Club. I think he drinks a lot. I see him drinking as he works in his garage. I see him crumble and throw cans. Sometimes I can hear him and his wife fighting through the trees.
There are no American flags or thin-blue-line or NRA stickers on his truck. Nothing you could deduce a thought from. I don’t think they go to church. They aren’t as redneck as you might suspect. They both drive separate to work, and there is the dog, the big shepherd put out in the morning, around the time I get home from third shift, here in early winter when it is cold. And I see she is wrapped up in a kind of sweater, with Christmas colors. Though she is across the highway I can deduce, despite the cold, this couple cares in their own way. Though it is so cold our three dogs will barely go outside to piss. I guess some people do what they can. And when the man comes home these days, he goes inside first, before coming outside with a big bowl for the dog. It’s been weeks now though and they haven’t brought her in. Then I saw the woman was gone. I haven’t seen her car. And the man goes to work. Then I called the city about the dog. The dog had been out for weeks, I thought. I saw through our kitchen window across the highway and the bare tree line when the city arrived, I couldn’t hear but I know they told the man there was a complaint. I was surprised they took the dog and didn’t give a warning. I saw the man talking to the man from the city. Saw he didn’t yell but he seemed to look around as if he was wondering who made the call. My three dogs were napping on the couch. The van pulled away with the big dog.
The man goes to work every morning now. The woman is gone. The dog is gone. Sometimes very late at night I see the man through a window in his house. He sits at a table. He might be reading or on a computer. He looks like he might be drinking. I wonder can he see me across the road and tree line in the dark. My wife calls for me to let the dogs out to pee. Under the winter stars I stand and stare far off when I hear a dog howl. And my dogs howl too, and I see the light from the door open across the street, and the man stands out there, and walks to the dog house where now there is no dog. And that is when I saw the man bend in the light from the door and the streetlight and bend his back and step inside the empty wooden house and lay down to sleep where his Sheperd dog once slept.
Mini-interview with Sean Thomas Dougherty
HFR: Can you share a moment that has shaped you as a writer (or continues to)?
STD: The time I saw Lydia Davis read and she named everything she wrote “stories” was a moment I often return to. At that time she didn’t classify her work. It was just all stories. That still greatly resonates with me.
HFR: What are you reading?
STD: This week on my desk are a book of essays Pain Woman Takes the Keys by Sonya Huber; Tony Gloeggler’s new book of poems Here on Earth from NYQ books; Martha Silano’s posthumous New & Selected by Saturnalia Books; The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis; and Ian Haley Pollock’s powerful book of poems All the Possible Bodies put out by Alice James.
HFR: Can you tell us what prompted “The Dog’s Absent Bark”?
STD: I was walking on the west side of town near the city cemetery when I looked up and saw a face in the window. At the time I was thinking of my grandfather who grew up in Yonkers in an Hungarian Jewish family in the 1920s and 30s. Suddenly I had an in, this face, the light, a story. I thought I was going to write an essay but then instead a voice and character immediately emerged and there was this child. I am sure of the issues of disability emerged from my own life, family, work, and the ambiguity of whether hate or friendship exists between children, that blurry line.
HFR: What’s next? What are you working on?
STD: I’m working on three manuscripts. A book of lyric essays about my work as a caregiver. A book of prose poems. And a book of poems. All are about three quarters of the way. I also just completed a small collaborative chapbook with Jeremy Shraffenberger that was commissioned by Jim O’Loughlin of Final Thursday Press out of Northern Iowa University. That was released on May 1, 2026.
HFR: Take the floor. Be political. Be fanatical. Be anything. What do you want to share?
STD: We live in a country that murders white poets and Black folks on the streets, that uses faceless goons to cart away hard-working brown people and send them to private concentration camps. They flood our feeds with fake facts and doctored videos. They use AI to slant reality. These days it is more important ever to look on the streets, to see your neighbors, to fight authority. If we are going to do down let us go down singing.
Sean Thomas Dougherty’s (he, him) most recent book is Death Prefers the Minor Keys from BOA Editions. His awards include a Fulbright Fellowship and the James Hearst Poetry Prize from North American Review. A longtime disability worker, he works the third shift as a medtech and carer along Lake Erie.
Check out HFR’s book catalog, publicity list, submission manager, and buy merch from our Spring store. Follow us on Instagram and YouTube. Disclosure: HFR is an affiliate of Bookshop.org and we will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase. Sales from Bookshop.org help support independent bookstores and small presses.
Heavy Feather Review 