Dogfight

Published in The American Poetry Review in 2009, Dogfight is an early poem by jaamil that confronts violence, masculinity, pain, and the ways the body learns to survive.

Using the brutal imagery of fighting dogs as its central landscape, the poem moves between animal violence and a childhood memory of physical conflict. Bodies become sites of struggle, shaped by aggression, fear, pain, and the pressures of learning how to defend oneself.

Dogfight reveals an early thread within jaamil’s wider interdisciplinary practice: an interest in the body as a place where personal experience and larger social forces collide. Through visceral imagery and physical language, the poem examines what happens when violence becomes something learned, embodied, and remembered.

The poem was published alongside About Deliverance in Volume 38, Issue 5 of The American Poetry Review, released in September/October 2009.