I named my dogs Verlaine and Rimbaud, both mutts who liked getting into other people’s garbage.

They weren’t well-mannered or well-kempt, but friendly in a panhandler sort of way, inseparable in their shakedowns. Yet those probing eyes… They were enough to turn even the most calloused soul into a poet.

Jim Doss lives with his wife and three children in Sykesville, Maryland, and earns his living as a software engineer. He has previously published two books of poems: Learning to Talk Again, and What Remains. In partnership with Werner Schmitt, he also published a book of German translations entitled The Last Gold of Expired Stars: The Complete Poems of Georg Trakl 1908 – 1914. In his spare time, he is an editor for the Loch Raven Review.