The Night After My Vaccine I Taught My Dog To Speak

BY ANGELINE SCHELLENBERG

Take me to Banff, she said. 
It didn’t seem possible—

she hates car rides. 
Even on prairie roads. 

I’m afraid to fly, I reminded her.  
Do you really want 

to spend the night locked up 
like luggage in a hold? 

I like the destination, but you know 
the journey’s hell. 

Her big brown eyes glazed over. 
Just think of the poems 

you and I will write 
beneath those coniferous slopes? 

And after that, she went on, 
I’ll need to smell

the dust just outside
the Colosseum in Rome.

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ANGELINE SCHELLENBERG is the author of the triple Manitoba Book Award-winning series of linked poems about autism Tell Them It Was Mozart (Brick Books, 2016), four poetry chapbooks, and the elegy collection Fields of Light and Stone (University of Alberta Press, 2020). She is a Pushcart Prize nominee who also hosts Speaking Crow—Winnipeg’s longest-running poetry open mic.