“Talking Dog.” A Poem by Danniel Schoonebeek
“I speak in your voice / says the dog. / FBI hired me / one year & change / out of Quantico.”
“Talking Dog”
This guy cracks
the want-ad
digest there it is
talking dog
ten dollars
no questions asked.
Why so low the guy
asks the dog
the two of them
finally alone
alone in the orchard.
I speak in your voice
says the dog.
FBI hired me
one year & change
out of Quantico
job was man
& commandeer
no-evac black sites
ill & numerous
let’s say lousy
with unsavories
this is embedded
every day like cork
zero alias
deep inside the gulf
now I’m scrubbed
your man runs lead
via pirate radio
on false flag
agitprop performance
art operations
staged explicitly
in order to
cultivate & record
raw dark-web
oppo research
for whichever client
pays me that day
& whose name
I should say
like my own
is nowhere on this.
Also today is
my birthday
I’m seven years old.
That dog
say anything else
the guy asks
the owner
the two of them
finally alone
in the anteroom.
Ad stated no
questions asked
money’s mine.
And besides
the owner
tells the guy
takes the ten
that talking dog
has never spent
a day outside
the orchard in his life.
–for George Lange
Danniel Schoonebeek
Danniel Schoonebeek is the author of American Barricade (YesYes Books, 2014) and Trébuchet, a 2015 National Poetry Series selection (University of Georgia Press, 2016). A recipient of a 2019 National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and a 2015 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from Poetry Foundation, recent work appears in Poetry, The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, and elsewhere.
