The speaker
The speaker in this poem is walking her dog and clearly feeling a lot of sorrow for the world. She thinks about drinking the deadly, polluted river water into her own body, perhaps from a desire to protect the environment, kill herself, or both at once. Over the course of the poem, partly thanks to the simple enthusiasm of her dog, the speaker moves away from despair and toward pragmatic (realistic) hope. She is not fearless or all-knowing, and she admits she doesn't have all the answers, but she is all the more relatable and human for this vulnerability. She invites us, as readers, to share with her in this cautious optimism.
The reader
Limón does not explicitly name the reader in most poems, but she does so here:
Reader, I want to
say: Don't die.
By doing this, she seems to take a guess that the reader may be feeling some of the same despair as her. The preceding lines are also in the second-person "you," asking the reader if they "fear humanity." The reader is instructed not to give in to despair or the desire for death.
In its last five lines the poem shifts from "I" to "we," and because the reader has been explicitly named as a participant in the poem, this "we" likely includes both poetic speaker and reader. Assuming this interpretation, the last two lines of the poem again directly invite the reader to join the speaker: "[maybe] we can walk together / peacefully."
The dog
The speaker's dog is the reason for the poem's titular image: the leash. The dog is characterized as recklessly loving, "soft," "alive," and "wanting to share her goddamn enthusiasm" with the world. She tries to run into the street to "love" the pickup trucks, and is only saved by her leash. The dog acts as a foil, a counterbalance, to the speaker: while the speaker is melancholy, worried, and deep in thought, the dog has extremely simple and positive emotions. While the speaker has trouble seeing the good in humanity, the dog sees only the best in the world, and is sure that even the pickup trucks will "love her back."
Ada Limón writes about her pug, Lily Bean, frequently, and has even dedicated several of her books to Lily Bean (along with her husband).
The crowd holding hands
Line 3 describes "the spray of bullets into a crowd holding hands," which could refer to any of a variety of mass shootings that have become tragically commonplace in the 21st century: concertgoers, worshippers in church, school children, or more. It is a brief description but evokes the senselessness and inhumanity of these shootings by emphasizing the peaceful nature of the victims. This one image stands in for a huge number of people's lives.
