Bred Projection

Let's workshop this poem where a narrator, while watching a dog pooping, considers how human projections onto animals might be implicated into molding them to fit our preferences and desires

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Day 1 poem for Miami vacation

Bred Projection

Squatting there on my front lawn, bearing down, she looked off
to the side, picking me up in the corner of her eye—ears erect 
on a sleek head tilted slightly over shoulder my way as if to see, 
whisker brows twitching, whether I was indeed watching her.
Her tail dipped down, the pinch of her sphincter premature—
so at least I projected—because I was indeed watching her.

She tried to break the link, jittery nose dripping, by looking off
from my eyes in childlike hope to find me no longer transfixed.
But how could she not check back? Unable to break the link,
under cliché sad-brows her vivid eyes twitched back and forth
between my own (just as humans sometimes do in the drama
of close discussion of difficult matters: a breakup, for instance).

The projection is much less in my presuming to know her—
him?—than in our grooming efforts to ensure the satisfaction
of our preferences, often unconscious to us, when we molded
wolves to dogs, killers to friends capable of facial expressions
refined enough to reflect understanding us, to relay messages
to us: be it adopt me or, in the case at hand, let me shit in peace.

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This poem is unpublished

Photo: k9ofmine.com/why-dog-stares-when-pooping/