The Repulsive Dolphin [first appeared in Sentence: The Journal of Prose Poetics]

At the beginning the most difficult part was finding the neck of the dolphin, as he has only a stout place for shoulders ending in a meat-beak for eating, and his neck is but the thick graduation in between. I eventually took his neck to be just behind his blowhole and I gave that area several chops.

This being ineffective, I stuffed my right fist deep into his blowhole. He began to noise. It was like the music of swans.

I knelt above him like that with my fist in his blowhole until he began to breathe through his mouth and exude a kind of relaxing calm, until I was completely relaxed with him.  Of a sudden a stiffness came into him and he gripped down on my fist with the powerful muscles of his blowhole and rolled quickly once to the left throwing me over his body to the ground. I umphed and held hard but he repeated this action several times banging me to the ground in a kind of sea-judo, holding me so tightly I could not remove my fist.

He stopped to gather himself and by this point I was desperate to extract my fist from his blowhole. For the first time since I saw the dolphin alone on the beach, I looked down right into his eyes to try to determine what he might be up to. I can say the dolphin had a sad look in there in his eyes.  He looked very modern. Very contemporary. His eyes were moist and closing tightly and opening again in a kind of click-bang as if he were quietly crying his way through some very hard thoughts. Did the dolphin love me? I don't know. He had that sad look of a policeman who just needs to do what he needs to do.

Suddenly, by a brave explosion of sea-judo, the dolphin brought me down to the sea's hrumping edge.

I did not love the dolphin, I did not hate him; but I knew he was about to affect his escape.  So, sacrificing my forearm to his teeth, I plunged my left hand far into his mouth and found my right hand at the back of his throat and locked both hands deep inside his head.  In this manner I blocked both his air-vents.  He began to flap and jactate.

I dragged it like this in a hammerlock to the barnacled frosting of a seaside boulder.  Its body was this meat-flag flapping against my strength in the breeze of its own anaerobic panic.  I gave in to the pain of being its flagpole: I had but to hold the dolphin against the hurt of the barnacles in order to abrade it to death.  The more it abraded itself, the more it panicked and abraded itself. There were deep squeals. This time like swines. Before it was swans.