The pub ambiance burnishes the ice
melting in our glasses as you tell me
of people, this very week, here and
elsewhere, cutting the noses and ears
off living dogs. I want to slap you
for opening the door to pain, for
letting it pad in, bleeding, trailing
theodicy behind, for reminding me
that as I sit here, sipping house red,
in another house, the red is of a
different kind, a blunt force trauma
to the soul, a damage that doesn’t
heal but festers. You insist it is so,
obligating me to look, for how
can I write what I can’t imagine?
Who takes a selfie flaunting the ears
of a dog above the maimed animal?
My cruelties are not of the same order,
I insist, and they are not, but what
makes similar hands hunger for harm?
Look at a graphic of a geological clock,
That improbable line set some up to be holding the knife and others fearful of it
the thin sliver of human history,
the billions of years in which we
made no headline news, nestled in
our forebears, the tiniest of shrews.
Then think of the thin needle of fate
quivering before it set us down where
it did in the body it did, cloaking our
inner machinery with pigmented skin,
or giving us a womb, or making us draw
our first breath with the muezzin’s cry,
in a gated community, a tent, a tenement,
with guardians loving or brutal. That
improbable line set some up to be holding
the knife and others fearful of it, set me up
to be looking at you, aghast at your tainting
my evening with suffering. The night is no
longer for sleeping, instead it becomes an
interrogation, of those men lifting soft ears,
of me, turning away, of what horror requires
of me. You opened the door; I want to slap you.
My hands lift. You are gone. I set them here.
Read More:
What Drives People To Torture Animals? [The Independent]
Devon Balwit is a poet and educator from Portland, Oregon. Her work has appeared in Oyez, The Cincinnati Review, Red Paint Hill, The Ekphrastic Review, Trailhead Magazine VCFA, The Prick of the Spindle, and Permafrost.
