Before Garrison Keillor, A Dog Fight

His ass had that half corkscrew
of hell bent. The body before
the body. I would say it happened
in slow motion, but it was all hyper-
speed, a line of paper dolls
connected at the wrist and foot.
We knew it would happen before
it happened, before the dog dug
into the other dog’s body, before
we tried to forget the other dog
was a dog because we didn’t want
to see something die in front of us.
The owner of the make-believe
dying thing was screaming and kicking
the dog with the teeth. They were
all screaming. They took up all the sound
in the park. The rest of us only had
eyes. We were too afraid to open
our mouths and remember that we, too,
had teeth. But the little girl who chased
after the animal with canines
called it by name, Cookie or Clem
or Coco or Kiki—not a killer’s name.
We didn’t have any hands to move her,
any knees to kneel on, any tongues
to clack her away.

________

Rowan Quince Buckton grew up along the Hudson River and holds an MFA in Writing from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Writer’s Chronicle, Grist Journal, and elsewhere, has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and received an honorable mention in the 2018 AWP Intro Journals Project. She lives in Vermont, where she works as a librarian and serves as Senior Poetry Editor for 3Elements Literary Review.