For Dynamite
I never wanted to enter a room walled with steel
cages, a blur of old and new fur yapping, Pick me,
pick me! poor bastards and bitches begging
for their lives. I never wanted to choose on the spot
a mutt labeled 37F and later debate how
the rest went: needles in the flanks; gas; rafters
sagging with doggie nooses? Any way you cut it,
as they say, a bitter pill
to chew.
I certainly never wanted a Lhasa apso.
And here it is. And here you are
crouched above our new kitchen tile,
milk bone in each palm. Dynamite,
you say, doesn’t she look like a Dynamite?
I stand over you, your red mop streaked
with bleach, your shoulder blades
like kites above the rippled cord
of spine,
and I imagine
your parents—your father sweating
in scrubs, your mother
trying to breathe
you out, rowing against the current
of her own blood
(the doctor handling you like a time bomb . . .)
and how they knew, suddenly knew
you are Melissa, and how, really,
you probably aren’t.
Nobody lives in Times Square
except my friend, Mark A’Dato. Mark A’Dato and his juicer
stay up late at night, making beet-carrot-orange juice,
celery-beet-orange juice, apple-pear, pear-pineapple,
pear-celery-orange-pineapple-guava-banana,
and there are new rumors that they have been experimenting
with coconut milk. Our friend Mark A’Dato
has quit his job, cut the phone line, stopped paying all utilities
except, of course, electricity. Yet his window is dark.
Someone said he pays a Chinese boy to deliver his fruit.
Another said he sneaks out in the middle of the day,
dissolving into the tourism. A few of us
have climbed the ten flights, pounded on his door,
yelled, Mark A’Dato, we know you’re in there!
For Christ’s sake, we can smell the apple-beet-coconut!
Mostly, we stand around, during lunch breaks,
underneath the world’s largest revolving red neon lobster,
certain, mostly certain, our friend is watching.
