The Leash

The first lines of the poem establish a distinct tone of dread and emphasize the vulnerability of humans living in an uncertain world. “After the birthing of bombs of fork and fear / the frantic automatic weapons unleashed” (Lines 1-2) is no nurturing moment of creation. Human invention—shrapnel bombs, DNS attacks, automatic weapons—has brought violence and pain into the world instead.

The natural world in the poem is at odds with the mechanical and industrial. The sky is “slate metal” (Line 4), the river is “poisoned / orange and acidic” (Lines 6-7). In this nightmare landscape, everyone and everything suffers.

The “crowd holding hands” (Line 3) in what is presumably a moment of peaceful protest or solidarity, is the target of “the spray of bullets” (Line 3). War and gun violence—both fundamentally human threats—destabilize any sense of safety. A “slate metal maw” opening in a “brute sky” is unreasoning, implacable, and hungry. It “swallows only the unsayable in each of us” (Line 5)—the ineffable qualities of what makes us human.

The speaker asks, “what’s left?” (Line 6) after the bloody feast.

The catalog of horrors continues. “Even the hidden nowhere river is poisoned / orange and acidic by a coal mine,” (Line 6-7), the speaker says. The line links the human “unsayable” to the environment’s subterranean watersheds, reminding us how everything is interconnected and equally vulnerable to irresponsible practices and greed.

Weighed down by disasters, the speaker asks, “How can / you not fear humanity, want to lick the creek / bottom dry” (Lines 7-8). The image is uncomfortable, desperate, even bestial. Sometimes it seems like resistance is futile. How then, can you not succumb to despair and join in the corruption, “to suck the deadly water up into / your own lungs, like venom?” (Lines 9-10).

Right at this low point, the poem takes a turn away from distanced reflection to directly address the audience. The speaker says, “Reader, I want to say: Don’t die” (Lines 10-11). It’s a poignant plea and a powerful command.

The move closes a gap the reader may not have been previously aware of and highlights yet another facet of the interconnected systems that “The Leash” explores. The effect underscores how this poem, its reader, the poet’s lived experience, the environment, and the individual living in it, are all part of something bigger. Nothing operates or lives in true isolation; harm done to one part threatens the balance of the whole.

The speaker then dares to wonder if there’s hope, after all. She asks, “isn’t there still / something singing?” (Lines 13-14). Even when pollution kills fish and “the country plummets / into a crepitating crater of hatred” (Lines 12-13) voices can be raised in song and celebration.

The speaker doesn’t offer any definitive answers but thinks she can detect signs of healing, a “wound closing / like a rusted-over garage door” (Lines 15-16). The image is another example of the joining of interior and exterior, biological and mechanical. It also takes a rusted, closed-off garage door that has fallen into disrepair and decay—and ties it to a moment of potential transformation.

The speaker returns to the question about “what’s left” and the hope that there’s “something singing” when she describes a slice of her day. She is out walking her dog—an act requiring some fortitude for someone with a chronic illness. “I can still move / my living limbs into the world without too much / pain,” (Lines 16-18), she says. It’s a moment of quiet courage, an everyday task, and a celebration.

Limón takes the detail and places it into a larger phrase, deftly shifting attention to the moment when her pet runs towards traffic with gleeful canine abandon because “she thinks she loves them” and is certain the trucks return her affections. The detail brings the dog to life on the page: “her soft small self / alive with desire to share her goddamn enthusiasm” (Lines 22-23). The animal’s fragility and innocence are highlighted with a familiar blend of affectionate exasperation—one that can be extended to the foibles of humanity.

The dog is kept safe from her impulsive behavior by the leash in her caretaker’s hands. “Don’t die,” (Line 25) she says, echoing her earlier call to the reader. She wants her dog to “survive forever” (Line 25).

The pair continue to walk on through a liminal, uncertain space. Winter is “coming to lay / her cold corpse down upon this little plot of earth” (Lines 27-28) while birds fly “high and fevered above us” (Line 27). There is sickness, but healing may come. The opposition between warm and cold, life and death, natural and unnatural, inside and outside, solitude and community all create tension. At the same time, the poem works to build and emphasize existing connections.

The final stanza posits that maybe we, like her innocent companion, “are always hurtling our body towards / the thing that will obliterate us” (Lines 29-30) and suggests that maybe “we can walk together / peacefully, at least until the next truck comes” (Lines 32-33). The leash is our mutual bond of care, and interconnection, empathy, and community support may offer what we all need to survive the worst the world can throw at us.