The Donkey

Kimberly Quiogue Andrews

In the dream, I was watching TV, only the TV was actually a series of small objects that I held in my hands and could change by changing the channel. A basketball; a small plastic box; other things lost to sleep. Changing the channel stopped working when I held in my hands a tiny donkey. Lying on its side, the donkey reposed and the people around me (there were suddenly people around me) cooed and sighed, fawning over the donkey in my hands. It was only upon closer inspection that I realized I held in my hands two things: the donkey and one of the donkeys legs, which had been separated from its body. "It's injured," I said. "Its leg has been pulled off," I said. Somehow, no one but me seemed to notice. Cooing and sighing. As to an infant. I began to realize that the donkey was suffering, its mane and coat made coarser with streaks and flecks of blood. I wanted to change the channel. The channel would not change. I wanted the donkey to die. I could not kill it. In the dream, there was then the trunk of a car, and a sense of uneasy peace. Dreams are often boring because they are merely allegorical. The channel of my mind changes, and I slide accidentally into a pond. Frustrated and in up to my waist, somehow I know that the donkey has died. But now I am alone. There is no one listening, but then again, in the dream, this was always the case.

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Kimberly Quiogue Andrews is a poet and literary critic. She is the author of A Brief History of Fruit, winner of the Akron Prize for Poetry from the University of Akron Press, and BETWEEN, winner of the New Women’s Voices Chapbook Prize from Finishing Line Press. She teaches creative writing and American literature at the University of Ottawa.

Cover of Sixth Finch

Fall 2022

Editor
Rob MacDonald

Associate Editor
Jaime Zuckerman

Sixth Finch is an online journal of poetry and art, founded in 2008 and updated quarterly.

Poems in Sixth Finch have appeared in Best of the Net, The Best American Poetry, Bettering American Poetry and The Pushcart Prize.

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