John Minczeski: Little Ode to Taking the Dog Out • Cleaver Magazine

Poetry by John Minczeski
LITTLE ODE TO TAKING THE DOG OUT

The last trip to the yard
for the night, temperature
not minus anything just now.
The day, having lost
its train of thought,
clung to twilight
like a lamprey. It’s more
or less shadow anyway,
slide with it.
The dog sniffed the catalog
of each leaf: species and genus,
parent and grandparent
with no regard to religion
or geopolitical passion.
She’d sniff cabbages and fennel
that hold entire futures
in their seeds. She ambled,
storing backyard histories
and liturgies in her
miracle of a dog brain.
She pantomimed
for a drink of water.

John Minczeski, author of five collections and several chapbooks, has had his poems appear in Tampa Review, Harvard Review, The New Yorker, Triggerfish Critical Review, and elsewhere. He has worked as a poet in schools and taught in assorted colleges as well as adult classes at The Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis. A graduate of the Warren Wilson Program for Writers, Minczeski lives in St. Paul.