I spent an hour at work google image searching pictures of salukis looking majestic and no one noticed. I wish someone would have noticed because I wanted to show them the dogs. To point out to them look these are dogs! Can you believe these are dogs and not horses or reindeer or mountain goats or some other kind of thing? The feeling I have about pictures of salukis looking majestic is the way I want to feel all the time.
I took my lunch break at one pm so that I could hear Neal Conan’s voice on the radio while I ate tacos in my car. The way he says bye-bye to each caller before they disconnect makes me feel like the universe is a good place to live and I feel like if I can maintain focus on Neal Conan and Salukis I can keep all of my teeth in me until I fall asleep at night and then in the morning I can just think about bye-bye and strangely beautiful dogs again when I wake up and do this for the rest of my life or until Talk of the Nation goes off air and Google goes under and I have to find new things and methods.
Last night while I was asleep I felt a saluki creep into my apartment in the middle of the night and, without disturbing my wife or dog, slide me onto its back. It took me all around my neighborhood and then around the whole south side of Chicago and I clutched its fur and whispered about pepper spray and racism and dog bloat and everything awful into its ear because I thought it could make these things go away but at the end of the night it just put me back in bed next to my dog and wife and told me bye-bye and I said bye-bye and it was the saddest thing.
Russ Wood’s lives in Chicago where he is poetry editor and web designer for Red Lightbulbs. He has been published in or has work forthcoming in Pank, TRNSFR and Spork. His first chapbook Tiny People is forthcoming from NAP books in January 2012. His dog is not a Saluki, but rather a small-but-sturdy Jack Russell/Basset Hound mix.