"Runnin’ Down a Dream" • Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers (by Josh Shepard)

Joey finishes his breakfast and we’re out the door for his morning walk. Music pours from a neighbor’s closed garage, loud enough for me to make out the tune all the way from across the street and two doors down. I can hear my neighbor Eddie inside. It’s unclear what he’s doing in there — lifting weights, fixing his lawnmower, boxing maybe — but he’s shouting (not singing) along with (more over, really) the music with the occasional lyric. Joey waddles his extra-medium frame to sniff the trash bins at the curb, and Eddie shouts over Tom Petty, “— LIKE ANYTHING WAS POSSIBLE!” as the dog marks the edge of the grass with a steamy stream of piss. Eddie’s got a dog, too, strong and healthy, that he sometimes plays with for long stretches, laughing like he was the dog’s father, that he sometimes yells at, “GODDAMMIT,” angry as a father. “STUPIDSONOFABITCH,” Eddie calls his blue heeler (one of the smartest dog breeds there is). People ask what kind of dog Joey is and we tell them he’s a dumpster dog, because that’s where we found him, behind the KFC, licking up parking lot gravy and scavenging for gizzards. “WORKIN’ ON A MYSTERY — GOIN’ WHEREVER IT LEADS!” Another set of neighbors in the duplex next door have a shopping cart on their porch that gets filled with little pitbull puppies (then emptied, then filled, etc.) whose cranky mother, she with the always-sagging teats, roams the street freely, barks at me and Joey every time she sees us. The puppies were fathered by a muscly pit named Damu, he himself bred strong for fighting. “Damu,” I’ve learned, was the name of a Mesopatamian dying god, one believed to create life by giving up a part of itself. When Damu (the dog) disappeared, we knew he hadn’t run away. “Damu,” I’ve learned, is the Swahili word for blood. After Damu died, they replaced him with another dog that looks just like his predecessor — they call this new dog: Damu. Across the street, Eddie is “RUNNIN’ DOWN A DREAM . . . SUNNANUNNACOMETOME” and Joey, my spoiled, rotund goodboy looks back at me with smiling eyes that might see me as more than a father, something closer to a god. I say, “Hi, puppy,” and he skronks a skronk of delight. He might mean I love you; he could also be excited about the Puppy Butter cookies that are waiting for him inside. A couple weeks ago, after the carwreck, Eddie walked over to check in on me, asked about my shoulder, told me about this goddamned custody battle for his little boy. We found ourselves in agreement that all you can do is take it a day at a time, and then he headed on foot to the liquor store, saying “you be good.” With my phone, I take a picture of Joey and send it to my father. He sends back a pic of a red farm tractor that hangs on the wall in his office at home. It reads FARM HARD. From across the street and echoing down the block, the guitar solo plays, ends. The next song begins. You don’t know how it feels to be me.

Josh Shepard is the author of CUTTING PROMOS: PRO WRESTLING ERASURE POEMS (BRUISER 2024) and INSIDE VOICE: POEMS OVERHEARD (IN BOOKSTORES & LIBRARIES) (Ghost City Press 2022). He is the managing editor at BRUISER Magazine and lives in Oklahoma City, OK, where he works for the public library.