Aperture: Creationism

Daily the internet depicts a dog conceptualizing time [afternoon after morning morning

now afternoon later night           then night]

At noon, the neighbor brags of the impermeability of their triple-paned window and smokes under the

frame of the opened garage door,

the cat, scratched behind the ear is a crumbling

bunch of tobacco

on a walk a panting, joyful mutt

rolls in the sweet rot hiding between

panels of sidewalk and every time, miraculously, excavates a bare pork rib from the sand of a playground.

[Nevada; cut to the cool sand under a slide, beside: a shovel, a colony of ants, jelly, teeming]

Travelling breakneck, I use a cotton hem to nudge fingerprints off a photo's gloss, to polish the

ivory handle of a steak knife while I suck my teeth. [the this of this poem is a dog slinking by with his tail

between his legs]

The happy mutt, likewise a victim of the sun, sees everything that is red and everything is red

 [only the heat tolerant sole makes a footprint cannot cast shadow]

I am trying too hard to make these the same place [read: sand]

cactus jelly, ossification,

gunpowdered dust, sun-unrelenting

Refocus, the camera’s crosshairs pause, and in secret ecstasy the dog reaches marrow.

Emelia Kamadulski is a poet and artist based in Eastern Virginia. She has a degree in the arts from the University of Denver. When she isn't writing she enjoys making fake band tees and keeping in touch with the dogs in her apartment complex. Her work has been published by Dovecote Magazine, Waccamaw Journal, and others.