Portia Steele Award Organization(c)

First Place Winner, Poetry

Pound
by
Christina Lovin
Lancaster, KY.

Pound

My brothers would go there to shoot the rats
that ravaged the bodies of dead strays laid
out in trenches like those I’d seen before
in pictures of Auschwitz— deep ruts spanning
the property’s width behind the small cinder
block building that housed the living,
waiting animals. Once, a small black bear
paced in circles in one of the cages.
My father took me there again to choose
a kitten, my own dead beneath the wheels
of his car. And once, my bicycle crunched
up the gravel drive past the kennels,
to the back of the building, where two men
in dark uniforms waited beside a truck,
a dog-sized metal box resting in the bed.

Rubber tubing ran from the closed box
to the exhaust. The engine whined softly
as the driver leaned against the fender,
smoking a Camel. Howls of laughter from
both men—a joke about something. Crushing
his smoke with his boot heel, one turned and barked
“Go home. This ain’t no place for a girl.” Later,
when the pound had been left to the lost
and abandoned, I returned to search
the twilight ditches for that certain dog.
Impossible in the piles upon piles
of furred bodies—those that were still,
those others darting darkly among them.