Ingamar Ramirez is a freelance writer and poet. His words are written with the intention of gracing all surfaces and textures of human emotion. He is one half of the folk music duo Puddlejiver and can be found stretching his shadow under street lamps, or at a shore, hurling rocks sideways.

Shuttle Woof (October 25, 2011. Issue 32.)

After the recent success
of the Sputnik spacecraft,
Khrushchev ordered the launch
of the first earthling into space.
On November 3rd, 1957,
a stray dog was thrust into orbit
in a rocket shaped like a muzzle,
without a soul close enough to object.
There was no intention
that she would return safely.

Russia did not release
the time of her death
for over 4 decades.
People debated
whether she died
on day 6
due to the immense heat
and suffocation,
or if she was euthanized
before the oxygen withered away.

There were radio transmitters
inside that spaceship,
routing every meal she had,
every sip she drank.
The Russian Federal Space Agency
was notified of her jaded breathing,
her accelerated heart rate
as anvils of gravity
bulldozed the support of her legs.
They knew exactly when she died.

The Sputnik 2 spacecraft
reigned as the least visited grave.
A multifaceted urn.
How much inhumanity
can be harnessed to a dog?
A stray dog nudged off the edge of the Earth
until she could cover whole countries
with her paw,
until the horizon was a sun
that cried with incandescence
blurred into boundless shades of blue.

The first name given to her
was Krudyavka, or "Little Curly,"
but it didn't last,
as if to say
she wouldn't last.
"Little Curly:"
why waste 2 adjectives-worth
of endearment?

Thus they renamed her Laika,
or "barker" in Russian,
as a way of declaring
at least she won't die quietly,
like a pre-emptive afterthought;
which is also disheartening
because Laika is a rather
beautiful name without the context.
Who knows, you may have heard it
bridging two words together
in a song once,
like whenever music plays
there is a minute probability
that she is mourned for
by an intangible libation of frequencies.

As for how quickly her journey ended
Laika perished before
newspapers could announce
that she made it into Earth's orbit.
The nose cone
of the space craft did not eject correctly,
which aggravated thermal control.
Laika died weightless in zero gravity and fatigue,
a hovering sweaty heap of her last moments
in a muzzle-shaped spacecraft
traveling faster than any vehicle
known to man.
Could a homeless dog go more astray?

For 162 days Sputnik 2
circumnavigated the Earth
until the atmosphere incinerated shuttle
and carcass into molecular fragments
of themselves
like a religious death ceremony.
This may sound cruel of nature,
but perhaps it was justified.
Perhaps it was better for
Laika never to return
and be excavated by human hands
for further analysis
only to be escorted
beneath six feet of dirt.
We had just put her through space:
a milestone we were not brave enough
to conquer ourselves.