Poetic Sequence: Animalistic

Pheonix

I try to forget
I had a gecko once.

She was sickly,

not that we knew that yet.

What she really was

was an impulse buy.

My sister bought one,

and I saw her,
I fell in love.

I named her Phoenix,

but I spelled it wrong.
The E before the O.

Maybe that’s why,

when she went,
she didn’t return
from the ashes.

1
Fish

My first fish was false

A blue plastic thing
From a gumball machine.

I lost him when

We moved.

The second ran parallel

And he was alive.
He sat in a bowl on top
Of the wardrobe.

I lost him too

When we moved.

I had a goldfish
Just one–diseased
Probably. I wore all
Black the day

I buried her in
A pill bottle
outside.

Then there was Nina,

She was a baby. She sat
In a cup during the drive thru,
My hand protected her from sun.

She crushed herself

Under a rock before
I went to school.

The next, my mother talked

Me out of the name he was
Supposed to have. We put
In hot water,
I put him in too soon.

2
 I tried to save him,
It wasn’t ‘til later
I discovered that if I’d put
Him in cold water,
He may have survived.

Finally Benjamin,
Jess called him Franklin.
A sickly little thing.
He lived two or three
Years, happy and hungry.

He died of a tumor
Or whatever that
spot was.

3
Dog

I never met Buckeye,

nor did I meet Ripcord

because Ripcord died of cancer

and Buckeye bit my sister.

I thought of him though,

driving through Phoenix, Arizona.
A street called Buckeye
a block or so away from where
my mom had grown up.

I met Rosie though.

She sat out front of Ness’s Barn,

I went inside to look at the puppies.
Once they called my name,
she was in the bed of my uncle’s truck.

We flew her back to Kentucky,

I stared at the fishtank
while she stared at me through the glass doors.

She lost an eye the year before we put her down.

My uncle was breeding puppies,

and we were going to buy one.
Except she never got pregnant.
My dad called Ness.
He had a new litter ready to go.

Then I met Finn.

The first night he was home,

the neighbor's dog was barking.
He ran around me and
hid behind my legs.