We brought the dog home in the trunk.

All the way from school Dad said she was
back there, feet on the same red carpet as mine.

And so Laura Polley's sad little verse opens, promisingly, intriguingly, with a couple of declarative sentences that efficiently, even a bit brutishly set in the scene, a dead dog in the trunk, a little girl on a car seat, a father reassuring her in ways none too convincing. There's enough here to make you want to read more and find out what this strangeness is all about. James M. Cain couldn't have done better.But the third line blows the game:

The February sun made me feel like a thief.

This wouldn't have been the place to use a simile, and if the use of a simile were imperative, I might not have used to describe the first person narrator but instead some other detail of this world. And this where the poem evaporates entirely, becoming an untidy set of bound clippings from some one's streaming introspection. There details, of course, precise bits that convince us that someone once walked through his house, rode in that car, cared for the dead dog

You're not part of this memory. Your figure is missing
from the strange gray half-light of the closed garage
where he tried but couldn't shut her eyes, Siberian blue,
where we stood, two blunderers, not knowing what to do
with the clumps of dead fur coming off in our hands.

But it seems stilted at best; Polley feels the need to prep us for the emotional subtext of her stanzas and neglects to connect the sequence with anchoring tropes that would make the elliptical style a more interesting thing to parse. The central theme is estrangement , I think, and that is not interesting in itself; there is simply not enough here to bother with.

The poem, in brief, is a mess; interpreting it what she might have meant while writing it , for me, is tantamount to letting off her obligation as a writer and finishing the poem for her. It's a cheat.