Old News, a poem for Friday

News of the world from one random day in 2015

Dogsitting, 2015.

By Emily Dreyfuss

12 fellow journalists were gunned down for drawing a cartoon. 

No one asked me about their deaths today on ABC News. 

Kim Kardashian has her name on an iPhone game,

and I’m available for comment. The sun weakly lifted up the day 

each freezing morning I walked a stranger’s dog around the block. 

Coat buttoned over goosebumps and nightgown,

I knelt to gather poop like an entomologist hunting beetles, 

like it was the most important task on earth. It was. 

I made 1,000 bucks that I’d give back if I could keep her. 

Picking long white hairs out my mouth, the radio says the economy is on the rise. 

I tried to buy a house on a hill in a city I despise but the offer was declined. 

A thin skin of snow evaporates each afternoon leaving the near dead grass confused. 

I stand upon it, hopeful, wet, unleashed, 

calling up memories of spring until the sun sets at 4:15.

My sons picked those poppies, not realizing that’s illegal in California since they are the state flower. I painted that painting, of the shadows of a bench that almost never gets sits on. Even though the bench just sits there, you can see time passing through the shifting of the light through its slats and the rotting of its wood after the rain.