The Last Thing

He ate was a tiny piece of glazed donut I’d managed to squish two pain pills into
A miracle I kept saying, because he hadn’t wanted to eat in days.
The bite of donut just an instinct, slavering smell of fat and bread and sugar.
By the time he realized he didn’t want it
It was too late, swallowed in a lump down his soft red throat.
When the vet came the pills had kicked in. He half-slept.
A miracle I kept saying a miracle
He licked my hand, once. I sang you are my sunshine
(just the first few lines over and over because I didn’t know the rest)
And then the needle and the black-white line across his eyes
Like two inert, half-moon cookies.
The vet had come, an emergency favor, from a pool party
Hair in loose sunlit ringlets
Wet bikini top dampening through the light beach dress.
When she and my husband carried him out on the big brown bed
One of his toes banged against the kitchen doorframe and I screamed.
They looked at me
Just a body now
No more suffering
Understand?
But his toe oh please jesus help me his toe.
Who knew I was such a concretist. Me, who can barely sustain myself
Get to the dentist, pay my taxes. Me, whose primal fantasy is to shave my head
Drive to the shore and take a diesel stenched fishing boat north
North into the cold crystalline interior of Nova Scotia
North! Become a Buddhist nun, freeze-burn with icy dry mantric repetition
The last oily puddles of my American vapidity. Allow myself
One ceramic bowl of vegetable broth a day, pale slices of mushroom
Floating like little grey corpses. Forget what my own face looks like.
In the weeks before he died he wore a nylon harness wrapped around his belly
And I held him up by the handle on top, hefted him down the Weather-Tech ramp
To the patch of grass he killed and killed with his medicated dark
Mustard colored urine and then hefted him back inside, over and over
Like a workaholic with an inscrutably heavy briefcase.
But even while the grand opus of his life slowly erased itself
His mouth remained a pink freckled grin
And he moved toward the things he wanted
With his old lumbering, indominable enthusiasm
No cries for sublimation, no yearning for the antibiotic, all whitening spirit
No hairless cure through the cold water, the fumes, the dead stacked fish.
The things he wanted, all the sights and sounds and smells
They were all right here and the gods came tumbling through them
In every outrageously imaginable flesh-warm color:
The port wine perfume of the wild rose bush in full bodied August bloom.
My off pitch, warbly singing. Makeshift bed on the floor next to his.
My mother, come to visit, coral pedicure spectacular in her open espadrilles
Blue veined hands outstretched
Saying, voice like a hand closed on her throat my good boy
My beautiful, beautiful boy

Diana K. Malek lives in rural Connecticut with her husband. Her poems have appeared recently or are forthcoming in MudRoom Magazine, Fatal Flaw, Pangyrus, and Cimarron Review. She is currently a candidate in training at the C.G. Jung Institute of New England.

Published April 15 2024