Elegy

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My Doberman never appeared sick until the morning
he couldn’t get up from the kitchen floor. A long
cancer had grown by his spine, and there wasn’t much
I could do for him except tell the vet to end it.
He was lying on the metal table the same way
he’d been lying on the cold tiles of the floor at home.
Nothing was working. His eyes had the kind of confusion
I’d seen with my father when he was dying. Not like
in the movies, where characters die easily or in mid-sentence.
Oscar was eleven years old, which is old for that breed.
Big dogs don’t live as long as little ones.
He liked to kill snakes by jumping in the air, landing
on top of one, then shaking it in his teeth till he broke something
and it would go limp. He chased squirrels he could never
catch, and he was puzzled by the opossums who would go
limp before he did anything. He’d just stand and look at them.
Now, the vet gave him an injection, and
he went limp, and I stood there almost as puzzled
as he’d been by the opossums. About a week later,
they sent me his ashes in a box.


George Franklin Contributor
George Franklin is the author of two poetry collections: Traveling for No Good Reason (winner of the Sheila-Na-Gig Editions competition in 2018) and a bilingual collection, Among the Ruins / Entre las ruinas, translated by Ximena Gómez (Katakana Editores), as well as a recent broadside, “Shreveport,” published by Broadsided Press. Individual publications include: Into the Void, The Lake, The Threepenny Review, Salamander, Pedestal Magazine, Cagibi, and The American Journal of Poetry (forthcoming). He practices law in Miami and teaches poetry workshops in Florida state prisons.
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