The Perfect Storm


︎︎︎ Conor Truax

︎ Mar 13, 2023

The weatherman points
To a perfect storm that’s always
Been there anyway;
Particles from a dog-piss puddle
Percolate through the cloudy wisps
And down into the atmosphere
Where we all live. Not the dog though
The dog is dead, put down because
of an osteosarcoma, One of the rare cases
among the canine population. He was
such a good boy, Beautifully trained,
Always eating grass with love,
Right after the pesticide.
(I dreamed once that he could speak to
Me, Or maybe he could all along
And we just didn’t care to understand).
The vet was devastated,
Really, it was his last straw.
Death, Despair, Diabetes
Doctor of so many animals
With so little understanding of human beings
Themselves. He died by suicide,
I heard
Wait… No
That was the dentist…
Wait… No
That was on the TV show.
But dentists do have the highest suicide rate
of any profession A friend of a friend…
of a friend’s mom Shared in a Facebook infographic.
That’s why my uncle got out, Had to,
Lost all his fingers in a snowblower accident.
It was a free snowblower, a Family heirloom,
And it shot Unc’s fingers out the chute
Like he was trying to touch God.
The fingers fell eventually, as all things do
Back into the snow, where they stayed preserved
Until they were Sewn back onto his hands.
That Frankenstein motherfucker. The fingers don’t work
Anymore but they're there, the same old fingers,
In the same old place, with different connective tissue.
The blood was never recovered, couldn’t be.
This is something no one seems to mention.
The pint that sprayed on the white glass ground
looked like so much at the time
But now it’s totally gone
And nobody cares to wonder where it all went?
Did it sink deep into the ground,
toward a pore water core,
Or did it evaporate up to the sky
Where the cirrus wisps film now
With particles from the dog-piss puddle
That freeze into the snow that falls
ever so gently into my childhood mornings.
“Don’t eat the snow!” My teacher yells at me
But the snow is too white to be from anywhere
In this world,
So I swallow it all anyway












































































Conor Truax is a writer in New York.

Also by Conor: New York Love