In a siren’s sea-foam scrubs, the beautiful technician comes for the black-tongued
dog. Beneath the unnatural hazel of her eyes,
silver piercings
expose the translucence of her blue-inked skin I have borrowed
for the morning
to escort death. My own hide, brittle with guilt and nascent knowledge of how
we learn to kill what we love.
How I wish it could have been the fangs of coyote or cougar, feral and holy. Yet, we are
here now; where through a narrow
window, morning’s domestic
light ravishes the stained pallet on the floor. The aide’s fingers pilot the
first syringe
like a drone into the vial, extract the nectar, then slip the needle into the fold
of the animal’s neck. Without a flinch,
the wild dog breaks me with her eyes, her head in my lap, until her precious form slips
sideways onto the velour mat, her black
and tan fur liquid with breath,
slowing now, un-quicked from this morning’s run through the canyon
where I returned
my second hawk to un-jessed sky. I remember the horned owl the dog
snatched from the air, its failed strafe
transmuted into shiver of feathers between teeth, until release. Then the 2nd needle,
which, if moral, my guilty hand would have
guided to miss the dog’s pulse,
diverting the treacherous point into my own
brutal vein. Rather, I surrender to wilding tears bleeding across my denim shirt,
until the black-tongued dog’s
savage beauty vanishes into memory,
and I remain,
alone,
ugly,
yet still named
human.