Jack

poem by Catalina Martinez Wittinghan
illustrations by Luana Rodriguez-Feo Vileira

This story is from Atrium’s Spring 2025 magazine, which released April 2025.

Palmetto-Leaves by Harriet Beecher Stowe entails her journey as she travels by boat to visit Florida. She first lands in Savannah, Georgia and then takes a train to Jacksonville, Florida where she proceeds to travel visiting the St. Johns River,  St. Augustine and more. She travels after the Civil War, exploring Florida’s nature and publishing her travel guide in 1873. At the beginning of her journey, she encounters a wild dog that joins the ship of people travelling to Florida.

It’s an overcast morning, leaving shore

as he stumbles onto a cage of bones, 

carrying nomadic weightlessness. 

He feels the “smooth, slippery, cheating,

ground swell” underneath as the world

begins rocking, proving his imbalance.

A circus of smells pulls him in every direction

and he cannot seem to find footing

among stonewalling strangers.

His tail wags and his sloppy smile 

seems endearing until the look in his eye

is just a heartbroken romanticization

of the life he doesn’t have.

He desperately holds onto the splinter of kindness 

-a young smile wrapped in pink chiffon-

in the deck of dehumanized emotions:

“Tick, tick, pitapat, go the four little paws after her.”

But under a sky like trenchant, torn-up cushions,

her sympathy fades and he’s left to no one.

She forgets her awe, leaving a lump of “rough, 

dusty hair, full of sticks and straws” behind 

for the crowd to kick and heckle and cast out.

And when their footing becomes once again solid, 

his loyalty stands alone

as he is marooned over nameless soil 

and never knows what it’s like to be called hers.