You live in comfort among the humans.
Eat the food the humans provide.
Sleep at the foot of the humans' bed.
Gnaw and squeak the toys the humans throw.
Accept the caresses of the humans' hands.
Play along with the humans' arbitrary commands: sit, stay, roll over.

It doesn't take much to make a dog happy.
A treat,
a pat,
a "good boy,"
a ray of sunlight through the window.

A ride in the car, head out the side, wind whooshing back your ears.

Suddenly, a door opens and
you leap down into unfamiliar grass, fresh and crisp.
The humans loose your restraints with a click and a clang.
And for the first time, you look around and see your own kind.
Quadrupedal, fuzzy, and fluffy mirror images,
big and small versions of you.

You run.
You've run before, but it's never been like this.
Front legs, back legs pumping
​alongside other front and back legs,
all with the same purpose,
which is just to run.
Alongside a pack.
In a pack.

They love you, the humans.
You love them, you do.
But you will never understand each other.
They can get down on all fours
but they'll never know what it is to live there.
They can mimic your whine
but they'll never speak your language.
They can do a thing they think is running,
but they'll never run the way you run.

You run,
and you know now that there is such a thing as an equal.
Claws digging in the dust and dirt
in rhythm with the claws beside.
You run,
mouth open, tongue flapping. 
And the wind that whooshes back your ears is a new wind.

Who'd have thought a polyphonic novel with four distinct storylines, taking place across boundaries of time, space, form, and species, would take a really long time to write?

Still plugging away at Not for Nothing, the "Big Long Island Novel." It's the book I was born to write. It's coming, I promise.

Progress on the Big Long Island Novel™ has been slow, in large part because my habitually unruly body has decided to be particularly unruly over the last few years. I look forward to a three-month convalescence from an upcoming surgery, during which I plan to complete my first draft, come hell or high intracranial pressure. In the meantime, I've begun chronicling my health journey on Instagram here.

I can’t remember the last time I threw my head back like this.
The cardboard black-lensed frames are supposed to go over your glasses
but they don’t fit over my gigantic hexagonal frames,
which are gigantic on purpose
because I need their prisms to compensate for the
fourth cranial nerve palsy
that causes me, has always caused me
to see double,
and the bigger the frames,
the more of my field of vision they correct.

There’s already a poem somewhere
about how my first lesson in existentialism came at age 5
when I learned that not everyone
sees a transparent and movable facsimile
of the object on which their eyes focus
when they tilt their head a certain way.
Just me.

Anyway, NASA only says you should put the eclipse glasses
over your regular glasses
and I don’t have an astronomer on speed-dial
to ask whether I have to hold the things over my glasses
for the length of the whole production, or if
it’s safe to wear them underneath.
I don’t really know the mysterious physics of eclipses,
don’t really know how it all works, but
I picture a pipsqueak with a magnifying glass
harnessing the sun to incinerate ants to death,
except the ants are my eyes.

So I figure I’ll just take off my prescription glasses
and wear the things properly.
My eyesight is pretty clear, all things considered,
so it’s okay to take the specs off for about the length of a shower
without causing an eye-strain headache.
I go up to the roof of my office in Long Island City,
take my glasses off
and put on this UV-friendly masquerade mask,
something I won’t have a reason to do for another forty years
(if I make it that long.)

These ersatz glasses are 100,000 times stronger
​than regular sunglasses.
So most of what you see is black.
In the center there is a bright orange crescent
like a fat waxing cracker dipped in melted cheddar. 

It’s a neat trick, 
these celestial bodies suspended in a cosmic dance,
but it doesn’t really warrant the hype.

But wait– 
the double.
Just below and off to the left is a carbon copy,
and as I move it moves with me.
And unlike when I’m looking straight ahead,
when I’m looking up at the sky like this
I can spin and spin and the double never disappears,
only dances,
the real helio remaining centric all the while.
I have gone from disability to superpower in the time it takes
for Clark Kent to transform with the power of accessories.

Here I am, an important adult among important adults
all thronged together with our advanced degrees
everyone stationary, staring at the sky,
and me here twirling round and round
in the kind of twirls only little girls in flowy skirts understand. 
Twirling so that the second eclipse revolves around the real one
which stays put in the middle
like it’s the actual damn sun, which it is.
Twirling, amazed that even for a moment I forgot 
what my own body can do.

The path of totality is just to the west.
Like death it always seems to miss me by a hair.
Somewhere else there are people taking off the glasses
and looking directly at the sun’s luminous corona
framing a black orb.

But I’m fine right where I am.
I don’t feel like I’m missing anything.
Because what could be more spectacular than your very own
built-in kaleidoscope sitting on either side of your nose?
Here I am,
in love with my lazy eyes.

This can’t be a poem. It’s too obvious. 
Garish, bursting with its own symbolism
like an overripe mango,
like a cartoon rabbit with an oversized mallet,
like the image of god on your toast,
like a total eclipse.