The Leash Literary Elements

First-person speaker, sometimes a plural "we," at first deep in thought and later taking her dog on a walk

33 lines in one stanza, free verse

Line 1: "birthing of bombs," metaphor of bombing as childbirth
Line 4: "that brute sky opening in a slate-metal maw," metaphor of the sky as a maw (gaping mouth)
Line 10: "like venom," a simile for the toxic river water
Line 14: "something singing" as a metaphor for beauty / hope / a reason to live
Lines 15-16: "the wound closing / like a rusted-over garage door," a simile for the pain and discomfort of healing
Line 28: "her cold corpse," a metaphor of winter as a dead body
Line 32: "like the dog obedient at my heels," a simile for how we (speaker and reader, or humanity) can coexist peacefully

Line 1: alliteration of /b/ and /f/, "birthing of bombs of forks and fear"
Line 3: alliteration of /h/, "holding hands"
Line 11: alliteration of /d/, "Don't die"; assonance of short /i/ sound, "silvery fish after fish"
Line 12: assonance of /u/, "country plummets"
Line 13: alliteration of /cr/, "crepitating crater," assonance of /a/, "-tating crater of hatred," and consonance of /tr/ "crater of hatred"
Lines 13-14: alliteration of /s/, "still / something singing"
Line 17: alliteration of /l/, "living limbs"
Line 19: consonance of /k/, "pickup trucks breaknecking"
Line 22: alliteration of /s/, "soft small self"
Line 28: alliteration of hard /c/, "cold corpse"
Line 33: assonance of /ea/, "peacefully, at least," and /u/, "truck comes"

Line 16, the sound of a rusted garage door is not usually pleasant, but here is used as an unlikely symbol of healing
Line 28, "cold corpse" refers to winter, and is ironically a more vivid image of death than most of the violence described earlier in the poem

Contemporary poetry

Outdoors on a dog walk, in fall / early winter

Heavy and despairing, transforming into hope

The human speaker against self-destructive despair

The struggle of the twenty-first century speaker to live despite a barrage of bad news, violence, and injustice in the world.

The poem has a distinct turning point almost halfway through, in lines 13-15, when the speaker shifts to start focusing more on hope and on the images of the dog walk.

The word "unleashed" in line 2 hints at the later importance of the dog's leash as a central image of the poem. The images of the poisoned creek in lines 6-7 also foreshadow the dead fish in lines 11-12. Lastly, the closing phrase in line 33 foreshadows the inevitable passing of more trucks.

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Line 17: "my living limbs" as a synecdoche for the speaker's whole body

Lines 4-5: the sky is personified as a beastly mouth opening
Line 13: the word "crepitating" usually refers to bones within a patient's body, so could be a subtle personification of the country as an organism whose bones are grinding against each other
Lines 27-28: winter is personified as a dying woman

Line 12: "the country plummets," a dramatic way of saying the country feels like it is falling
Line 25: "I want her to survive forever," an unrealistic hope for the dog's life

Line 22, "roaring"
Line 24, "yank"