Balloon Dog
A woman woke up and counted her children. She didn’t think about God. She thinks she never thinks about God. She likes dancing naked with a mouth full of cookie because for no good reason there’s a party in her head. And as for the rest of her morning, what can one say? Down the street a neighbor she’ll never meet punches her hand through a window because a stranger has parked in her driveway then kisses her kids and sends them to school. And the sun rises a little higher. A balloon dog crosses the sky. Then we all float away.
Michael Martin is a poet, editor and filmmaker living in North Carolina. In 2020 he was a finalist for Poetry International’s Cavafy Poetry Prize. His first collection of poetry, Extended Remark was published by Portals Press in 2015. Poems from his new poetry manuscript appear in journals such as EPOCH, American Journal of Poetry, Poetry Ireland, RHINO, & the Moth, among many others. For a decade Martin lived in Amsterdam where he was a feature writer and editor with Amsterdam Weekly; in 2010 he edited the Harper’s anthology Rules of the Game: The Best Sports Writing from Harper’s Magazine.
