I ate a dog treat/Tricky Crunchy Things

by Ivy Jones

Il Vagabiondo

We can’t bite anymore. Latch on and stay. I would love to taste fresh ink from tattoos, stray hairs long as the Eiffel Tower’s calves. That time we went to Paris I ate a dog treat, I didn’t say bonjour, and I ate another dog treat. It rained and hailed and such, and I got your likeness put behind my elbow. Don’t doubt me; I can list things, or make “Pavlov” a verb, or smell the flaking iron balcony, or grow my fingers long and wiggly to scare the children at the puppet show. Not hard to put dumb shapes together and make people see the big picture. You built a floating shadow head spitting goat and cheese onto the stage — then up came light, the sun is a big! red! bauble! in the sky, pulling the city of lights up to meet him halfway. With that blood on my stomach, I see myself bare against my will: if I could throw a firecracker into the back alley, if I could stomp on the flowers, the shroud of WHATEVER-HOWEVER would release from my shoulders, and you’d love the straps on my lingerie. If I could skin an arm with my teeth, my blunt gray tombstones that don’t pierce, I hear The Louvre herself would sell fifty-something-thousand tickets that day only. Counting that high, that’s preschool work, but I can guarantee it. My word is my word, even as I undress and attempt so hard to wash. Drawing a sink bath, I spread tricky crunchy things across the floor and tap the sop from my tattoo.

---

Ivy Jones (he) is a storyteller from Georgia who enjoys finding new ways to say mundane things and is currently in the market for some sort of rhyming dictionary. He edits a journal called Zero Readers and can be found primarily on his Twitter (ivyintheroad) or Instagram (ivy.twines).