Educating Innocence
by Gordon Kippola
I feel the time has come for us to chat, Willy;
if you concur, keep barking. Pam, my neighbor—
your owner, suggests that you are more afraid
of me than I’m afraid of you. Pam also suspects
my terror is pulling your trigger. She’s got a point:
fake calm is kind of my thing. As I walked past
the cottage due east of this chain-link from mine,
the house that you guard, you slipped your leash.
Forty Rottweiler kilos of claws and Willy teeth
ran fast and straight at Antiquated Me. I froze.
You chomped my wrist, but didn’t break the skin,
which gives me hope that you and I can still arrive
at mutual respect. It’s vital that you learn, good boy,
as mammals go, man is yellow-jacket-adjacent, just
orders of magnitude awfuler. Fomenting assholeries,
we perfect our nature in war. Our swollen brains,
our talky-tongues, and these opposable thumbs
makes homo sapiens your pesky apex predator.
Preferring dogs to people, I’d love to be
your friend, but if instinct makes you wary,
that’s okay. Some distance might be safer
for you, Willy. While you growl, I’m reflecting
on resolution options should one more bite occur:
call Animal Control - poisoned treats - my pistol -
maybe a club. Spit-balling prior to alibied schemes.
It’s business, but such unpleasantness feels impolite.
Who needs that? Help keep me far from being human.
“I don’t like to think of myself as genetically and historically predisposed to violence, even to murder, but of course I am. ‘Educating Innocence’ is based on a real life nip I received a few years ago from a neighbor’s dog. I’ve changed the dog’s name, swapped its gender, and shifted the neighbor’s house to the opposite compass point… so my neighbors (neighbors I really like, by the way) will have no idea I wrote about their dog!” —Gordon Kippola
Following a career as a U.S. Army musician, Gordon Kippola earned an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Tampa, and calls Bremerton, Washington home. His poetry has appeared in Rattle, Post Road Magazine, District Lit, The Road Not Taken, The Main Street Rag, Southeast Missouri State University Press, and other splendid publications.