• Facebook
• Instagram

How My Dog Smells

Dean Flowerfeld

__________

The world is a whorl of wonderful whiffs
for a doggie like me who lives by his sniffs

and the wind is awash in a welter of wafts,
such succulent scents on the breeze are aloft:

the sweet and the sour, the savory and musty,
the stinky, the sensuous, the fusty and dusty,

and fine fetid fields of flatulent farts
that smell bad to you but are dear to the hearts

of doggies like us whose noses are superior
to the poor-sniffing humans’ whose smelling’s inferior

for we doggies smell smells by the hundreds of millions:
that humans can’t smell: not Americans, French, Africans, Brazilians.

We can also smell things that are far, far away.
You couldn’t smell them if you walked for a day

and some of those scents have such an aroma
that if you could smell it, you’d fall into a coma.

But the nature of these smells, I cannot convey,
I cannot explain it, there’s simply no way.

For if you can’t smell it, there’s no way to tell it.
It won’t do to shout it, it won’t do to yell it.

So, I leave you to your weak world of limited perception,
your ignorance of smells of which you have no conception.

I’m dying right now to have a nice pee
by lifting my leg against that old tree

and just down the road I see a cute mutt
who I’m going to check out by sniffing her butt.

__________

Dean Flowerfeld (a.k.a. David Blumenfeld) is an 86-year-old former philosophy professor and associate dean who in retirement returned to writing stories, children’s literature, and poetry after a sixty-year hiatus. A story of his received a “notable essay” citation in The Best American Essays, 2022; he has been twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize; and one of his poems was highly commended in the 2023 Autumn Voices poetry contest and reprinted in Five Points. His work appears in a wide variety of magazines and anthologies. Davidcblumenfeld.com

__________

Back | Next

To learn more about submitting your work to Boudin or applying to McNeese State University’s Creative Writing MFA program, please visit Submissions for details.