Things I Didn’t Understand
Traded for an antique free-standing, full-length mirror,
she lives in a kennel, her cage, lined up
with an unfinished section of privacy fence so she can see her family
through the sliding glass door
while swarms of flies worry her. She stands in piles of her own excrement.
Barks to drown the sound of her own loneliness.
At the next house she attracts suitors. Her chain denies her escape.
When she and the neighbor stud are stuck together I judge her,
like my good Catholic upbringing Dictates.
I never dwell on the fates of those eleven puppies nor my own culpability.