Dog Barking at the Moon, Joan Miró

This poem was published in The Avenue Journal, Issue X: Dogs

Dog Barking at the Moon, Joan Miró
by Alan Elyshevitz

Fortified by dark-brown
odors, hilly earth, the dog
with jowls and silly legs
is poised beneath paintbrush
craters of the Moon. So like
a dog to vilify an object out
of reach, lacking effective joints
to climb the foreground ladder,
red rungs of vertigo ascending
to a red-tailed vertigo bird. Art
such as this tampers with color,
a black sky inducing agoraphobia.
Good thing the dog is preoccupied,
better than knowing it’s alone.

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Alan Elyshevitz is the author of a collection of stories, The Widows and Orphans Fund (SFA Press), a poetry collection, Generous Peril (Cyberwit), and five poetry chapbooks, most recently Approximate Sonnets (Orchard Street). Winner of the James Hearst Poetry Prize from North American Review, he is a two-time recipient of a fellowship in fiction writing from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts.