Afterword
– Laika, cosmonaut dog

We will debate our desire for two
or three because two is one child per

parent, but three is a mirror of our own
childhoods. I will rattle with pickle

juice and saltines and French fry
fat. My belly will curve like a basil

leaf until we welcome moaning fists,
tiny toes, heads in hand-knitted hats.

We will cook mac and cheese for
their growing appetites as the sun’s

rays burn holes in the ozone’s orbit.
They will straw-suck juice boxes as ice

caps sizzle and sprawl, as air coughs smog
plumes into our gaped mouths, as land

molts dirt for a plastic bottle shell. We
will ask ourselves, What should we say?

when our kids come home from school
and ask about Laika, who hurtled through

space dust: gazed miles below to Moscow
streets she once mongreled and defended.

Whose cone capsule satellited across
stars as she ate powdered meat left for her

last meal, whose final breaths kettled over
when the heat shield broke on the fourth

orbit and fevered the cabin. What will we
say of the return that was never intended:

her tiny skeleton decaying as the spacecraft
flamed through the useless sky.