Façade

by Cameron Conaway

We bought her from a one-
eyed, summer-toothed man who lived
in a trailer and from his trailer,
as we later learned on the news, sold
cocaine. His floor was powder-white
with bird feathers that had been mixed
with bird shit and cat piss and ground
finely with footsteps. Rats would have fit,
but instead loose guinea pigs, chickens,
and the transparent peels of a shedding iguana
filled the filthy rectangle. To maintain
the constancy of C’s for our first names,
Mom named the one curled in the corner
with bulging Simpson eyes, batting paws
at the bugs on the ground, Chloe. She was twenty-five
dollars. Her mother was Pomeranian, her father unknown.

Our quote concerning Chloe is:
“You can take the dog out of the trailer,
but not the trailer out of the dog.”
One Christmas morning my sister Courtney cracked
my new Ninja Turtle Raphael’s shell in half.
I decapitated her new Jewel Hair Mermaid
Barbie, showing her that her doll
could do what owls could do.
She hiccup-stuttered to Mom,
grappling with whether to cry or talk,
when Chloe seized the doll’s
head and hid in her place, the hamper, where
the dirt from our days and the wet underwear
of our mistakes mingled. I chased
Chloe but could not find the head of the Barbie.

Later that night, Chloe, days after her excursion
to both the groomer (we asked to have her cut
like Simba to give her some class) and the veterinarian,
(we found out her heart was twice as big as it should be,
and Courtney replied:
“That’s because she has so much love for us”)
had an extraordinarily long tail. Patches
were lighter than her golden saffron fur.
By the centimeter, I pulled
the matted Barbie doll hair like Laffy Taffy.
She yelped when I pulled the wrong pieces.
Eventually, the purple, puckered lips
of her asshole began to spread and I saw the crown
of the Barbie, I pulled more, then the waxed
eyebrows, a little bit more, then the blue
eye shadow, one last tug, then the smiling face.

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Born in Altoona, Pennsylvania, Cameron Conaway is currently a graduate student and the Poet-in-Residence at the University of Arizona. His work has appeared in the Ottawa Arts Review, The New Writer, and Poetry Midwest.