Sentimental

by Jacqueline Berger

There was a death.
Two if we count the dog.
We count the dog.
You mourned more for him
than for your mother.
Pure sadness, unalloyed
with anger,
lavish, the feeling
dogs in their dying inspire.
The gush and swell of grief
loosening all grief
as it rises and barrels to the sea.

You watched John-John
in black and white
salute his father’s coffin,
you were six and listened
to the nation call him brave
and learned to disdain
self-pity, though who better
to pity than ourselves
whose sorrows we are bound to
though we bury the cables.
We need a procession
of dying dogs, a fleet.
We need to be bathed in tears.

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Jacqueline Berger

Jacqueline Berger’s fifth book of poetry, Left at the Ruin, was published in 2024 by Terrapin Books. Her previous books include The Day You Miss Your Exit, Broadstone Books; The Gift That Arrives Broken, winner of the Autumn House Poetry Prize; Things That Burn, winner of the Agha Shahid Ali Prize, University of Utah Press, and The Mythologies of Danger, winner of the Bluestem Award and the Bay Area Book Awards Poetry Prize. Several of her poems have been featured on Garrison Keillor’s Writers Almanac as well as in numerous anthologies and journals, including American Poetry Review, The Iowa Review, American Poetry: The Next Generation, Carnegie Mellon Press, Old Dominion Review, Rhino, River Styx, Rattle, and Nimrod. She is a professor emerita at Notre Dame de Namur University, Belmont, California.

Vol. 9 No. 1

Summer 2026

Sentimental