Man’s Best Friend

by Aileen Carey



               “It’s an inherently erotic landscape” - Christopher Rawlins on Fire Island, NY





The mad libs of it all is the dog died at the sex party 

a new money Dog Fancy posh pooch Kennel Club dog

an Upper West Side boxer with a squeezed in face 



The owners played him Handel when they left the house

let him sleep in their bed of red silk and fed him every day

a marinated chicken breast from the Greek deli downtown 



Anyway thirty minutes after they took their ecstasy they

went to go feed him a piece of prosciutto and he was

laying sideways in the sand with his eyes all smoggy 



His pupils were huge like black holes and standing above him

was a slippery looking guy in a too-tight J-Crew jock strap

claiming one second the dog was playing fetch with

an empty can of White Claw spiked seltzer and then

all of the sudden he was in quote Doggy Heaven unquote  



Then the chemicals from the drugs had to set in of course and

the death of this poor uptown dog was just so goddamn beautiful

they wanted to use the carcass as a centerpiece for a dinner party  

or decorate it with flowers and spices and send it drifting

into the Atlantic Ocean screaming with manic delight



Instead it was attracting attention so they put him in a matte black coatbox

a casket that smelled like Dior Homme and finished it off with the softest

largest baby pink ribbon you had ever seen in Fire Island NewfuckingYork



They couldn’t stop touching the ribbon and rubbing their faces in it 

feeling the perimeter of this box this demented celebration of life

so they brought it back into the party with them



They held it high over their heads as sand flew with the passion

of one thousand hopped up happy people and they swayed it

to the bass as it heartbeated through their rib cages

Until in the heat of it all the paw of that bastard boxer

ripped through the side of the box in a fit of rigor mortis

so profound that he seemed to say don’t forget this is serious





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