As A Fire Blazes in The Notre-Dame Cathedral
OTTAVIA PALUCH
1
My dog dies on a Sunday, July's rain
a muzzle around my heart. At night I dream
about the trails behind my house where we
weaved in and out of trees, bellies
hanging & knees scabbed. This poem is
about life. I know. My spittooned dog. God.
In the beginning, all the world was America*
so I lie still on her tracks, wait for the talons
to sink into steel. My bones sold for a carton
of milk. My face washed ashore on this desert
of the most golden grain. Good citizen
with the right features, only the wrong
eyes. Wrong name. But I want to say he loved
me anyway. My dog, I mean, the one
who drowned in sand. My mother tells me
to follow my dog's tango, tangle with our flag
until all the poppies drop. By morning, stoplights
stuck on red & the roads splitting themselves
open for the next super bloom. Look
how quickly I learn. I promise I can be better
than this city’s exhaust, better than the letters
pillaging the fields, all the right ones for god
& the wrong ones for myself: dog, immigrant,
god, god I love how good you are to me.
*From Two Treatises of Government by John Locke
OTTAVIA PALUCH is a disabled high school student who lives in Ontario, Canada. A Gigantic Sequins Teen Sequin in 2018, her work is published or forthcoming in Four Way Review, Kissing Dynamite, Room Magazine, Alexandria Quarterly, and Ghost City Review, among other places. Paluch has studied poetry under Jessica Lynn Suchon during the 2019 Adroit Journal Summer Mentorship Program, as well as under Matt Mitchell during Flypaper Lit’s 2020 workshop on poetic forms.