This is our dog. We do not love him any more.
Not after all the things he has done.
I am sorry to have to relate that his ears are the color a brass doorbell turns
at the home of a family with many friends. Their texture
is reminiscent of the bristle-back stroke
of a Eurasian boar. This is not to mention his talent
for walking long distances saucer-eyed on his back legs,
which look like drumsticks of a kind you would not want
to find in your bag coming home from the store.
There is not much we can do about these because they are attached
to our dog, whose nose tapers to a fine matte point like
the very furriest and most hopeful of doorstops, and whom
because of persisting difficulties such as these, in addition
to the importunate amber of his eyes and the peculiar tufts of black whisker
that he has sent out mutinously from the underbelly of his very long chin
like tusks, and the snack-sweet scent of his white-tipped paws
on winter mornings when he otter-undulates his
hairy and cunning way into our bed, we do not love any more.

Emma Cairns Watson coordinates university conferences on Egyptology and Armenian art by day and inhales other people’s poetry by night. Her work has appeared in Barrelhouse Online and Menacing Hedge and is forthcoming in RHINO, Half Mystic, and Ninth Letter. You can find her on twitter @EmmaValjean and (more importantly) her dog on instagram @the_durg.