PUP

Pup

I bring my pup to the veterinarian who has the schooling
and lurkings of suicide. At reception sits a girl afflicted
with face paint and no one to ask for dating advice. She
escorts us to a monocultural room that smells of washbasin
doglessness where my pup steels himself, flexing his nostrils.
The vet and her breezy anxiety enter with an air of echinacea.
She greets in large gestures and palpations. Skeptical, my pup
withdraws his paw. Like anyone of hard and soft surfaces,
he features organic plumbing and ductwork. The vet pops
a vaccine like champagne. She recommends a restorative diet
of appetizing organs culled from the wild. My pup crouches
in deference, but I know that look of dismay: Why do you not
curtail my discomfort? Where are the toys textured to my bite
and my mesmerizing bed? Please reinstate my sustaining boredom.

Coffee, Knitting, God

Ardor is what I feel, but not
for the arbor, not for the flesh.
I awaken to a sore-throated
machine that drips like an
overturned vial. I tell myself
this doesn’t count as putting
a substance into the mouth.
My fingers loosen then.
In a room I call “the studio”
projects of short row, wrap
and turn await. How do I
say what an eyeful this is?
Of colors that failed to emerge
in the original world. God
is restricted to earth-tone dyes.
He, prohibiting stimulants
and devoid of dexterity, would
love to see me drop a stitch.

Girl Playing with Dogs

She runs where they run,
linked by a tether
of hunger and sleep.
Yes, there is mud
and painful gravel.
Praise the grass,
its jumpable surface,
its never-ending ceiling.
The animals—
always themselves—
not happy but engorged
with pleasure, ask
in their dim way:
Who is with us,
running? It is she
who knows
where dogs bury
what they prize.

Lawsuit

When a beautiful child toddled
onto a chemically treated lawn,
something impaired her alimentary
canal and dispatched her beloved pet.

At first the child’s favorite toy
was suspected of filching the safety
record of a competitor’s model.

The manufacturer sought an injunction
to prohibit the gardener’s testimony
and that of the outmaneuvered child.

Meanwhile, the circumspect chemical
giant submerged its few germane
memos in a flotsam of arcane reports.

In court the doctor who revived
the child (but not the pet) felt
defamed by his wrinkled trousers.

Unfolding, refolding the Seventh
Amendment and the commerce clause
resulted in unforeseen origami.

All this for a quarter-acre of grass.
All this for a greener existence.

Alternatives

Either subscribe to ingenuity or travel the wry highway
at the edge of woodlands flayed by imported pests,
a wilderness where transponders die. At herpetology’s
boundary, fronds no longer uphold a rainfall, nor do fields
instigate mustard. The firmament is inconveniently
blackened by incinerated all-weather tires. This
hokey malfeasance supplants any reason to live.

Ferment subverts the exhibits of this open-air museum
whose docent is a weatherman. His backdrop maps
the daily hazards— heat wave, gale, a front from
Hudson Bay—that imperil our exemption. To comfort
our bodies, he tips us off to dip ourselves in public
waters, or make windows out of wood, or wear factory-
processed animals on our torsos and four cold limbs.

Alan Elyshevitz is the author of a collection of stories, The Widows and Orphans Fund (SFA Press), a poetry collection, Generous Peril (Cyberwit), and five poetry chapbooks, most recently Approximate Sonnets (Orchard Street). Winner of the James Hearst Poetry Prize from North American Review, he is a two-time recipient of a fellowship in fiction writing from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts.