In Short – Issue 5 (Spring 2026)

May 31, 2026

The author with Guillermo Girard

My Guinea Pig is a Celestial Body

By Margaret Dillow

I was too afraid to stare at a hole in the sky with or without protection. But some of my students carried their glasses with them all day, slipping them on when they thought I wasn’t looking. I didn’t say You know you don’t need those in here or It isn’t happening for another however many hours from now. I didn’t have any glasses at all. Tj caught a glimpse on his phone camera during a brief break in the clouds right above our house. I said I thought it would be darker because I’m stupid and hadn’t considered we wouldn’t be witnessing totality. Like any modest poet, I was looking forward to that part, at least: to persist in the night of the day, to authenticate my humanity by standing on this precipice of oxymoron. How much there is to perceive! I’d shout and my body would be on standby from all that perception, an automation of mystical senses employing some mantra: the blight the breath the light the earth the blight the breath the light the earth. But instead, we sat on our reddish porch in the greyish glow of a cloud-covered day, and I told Tj about a post I saw in one of my mystical Facebook groups where a woman took the time to warn us about our own windows and how we needed to keep them covered during the eclipse to save our pets from going blind. I said Because we all know how many dogs are going to notice that the sun looks different today and stare at it until they can’t see? and we laughed and the people on the internet berated that idiot person and when I went upstairs I closed the blinds in our bedroom where our guinea pig lives out his whole happy life just in case he decided to look up.

Margaret Dillow (she/her) is the founding member of the Post-apocalyptic Poets for a Pre-apocalyptic World, a collective dedicated to mutual aid and performance-based poetics, and co-host of Girlhood Movie Database, a podcast deconstructing depictions of girlhood in media. Her work as a writer and educator has been supported by the Tiny Spoon Residency, the National Women’s History Museum, and the NEH. She is the recipient of the Anne Spencer Memorial Award through the Poetry Society of Virginia and has an MFA from Hollins University. She has published most recently with The Palisades Review, Oxford Magazine, and The Words Faire. When she's not writing, you can find her hanging out with her guinea pig, Guillermo Girard, who is better than everyone.