Jon Kelly Yenser gives us poems that are simple in the very best sense: direct, gentle yet unsparing, as immediate as the thing he describes. And what he describes for us is the everyday lives and deaths of the ones we live with, and come to love.

Our dogs are dying. First Walter’s Emma
toppled in the blown forsythia, full
of holes inside, he told me, after the necropsy.
In June our black Lab began leaving herself
every evening, flushing quail, fetching
birds faster than ever in her cedar bed.
She went down one day and could not rise
from her own mess. That left us one apiece.
And not for long. I said, not long enough.
“It’s the same old, same old,” Walter said.
“Every so often it’s the end of everything.”

 – Excerpt, “We Lose Two Dogs”