Euthanasia 4

When cancer grates and livers fail, when dogs fight
and clients don’t pay my sister, the executioner, arrives
with her intra-muscular Telazol, her smock of bright colors.
In my dreams she leans over the meek, the old, the lame
of paw, pierces the skin of their hindquarters soft
as the belly of a mushroom, injects what she calls
the pink juice—Euthasol—a drug with too much
earnestness, too much enthusiasm, too much
ease. In my dreams, she grabs the splintered foot,
cold stainless steel already sticking, and shaves patterns
from the toes. People pay, and good, for private cremations
and paw molds. And in my dreams, my sister the executioner
never overheats the kiln, never breaks a mold.
But in this life
she breaks a mold, grabs some boarding dog, parts fur to phony.
In this life, she tosses the body into the fridge next to Tuesday’s
sandwich and Cerenia, which, she tells me is the color of raspberry.
She tells me of Bob, the pudgy cremator, how, with each bagged body,
he quips It’s a dead dog in a feigned British accent. She laughs
every time. She laughs because, in this life, there’s no playing God,
no mechanic husband crying on examination tables over
an HBC (hit by car), no doubt when they find tire marks
between shoulder blades. Afterward, she scrubs the table
with Roccal-D, signs condolence cards. Last week, she
brought me three, asked me to weigh them carefully, pick the best.