August 2021
John Dorroh
travelerjd59@gmail.com
Bio Note: I am John Dorroh, writer, former high school science teacher turned poet. I have never fallen into an active volcano, nor have I ever caught a hummingbird. However, I've baked bread with monks in Salzburg and drunk my share of their home brew. Two of my poems were nominated for Best of the Net and others have appeared in journals such as Feral, North Dakota Quarterly, and Selcouth Station.

Still Grieving for My Dog

I could live in a gallery,
pull red corpuscles off the faces
of portraits, hoping to find my dog 
in the asparagus patch behind my house.
 
I need the safety of walls 
and dried saliva and well-worn collars
with tiny white bones. You won’t
understand my agony until
Africa is a mere raindrop 
on the wall of some benefactor
who flinches when my pregnant 
neighbor dubs him  
cartographer. 
 
They all thrive from raping artifacts, 
from buried treasures, absorbing
aromas with 300 million olfactory 
receptors,
the DNA, amino acids
in the sarcophagi of long-dead
pharaohs, mummified like modern 
monsters, Frankenstein and the
Werewolf who roam the foggy
English moors for lung and heart. 
 
Egyptians favored cats who 
didn’t seem to care about anybody
but themselves. They eat dead
bodies, lick their whiskers and strut
tail-up into genetic history. Dogs,
on the other hand,
do the dirty work for all of us 
who enter the gallery and wait 
patiently for our souls to cross
the bridge.
©2021 John Dorroh
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