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