LICENCE APPLICATION

Mave Fellowes


My first pet was a human called Denys.

We rescued him from the mammal centre.

He was a smaller than average Caucasian with brown eyes and no beard.

He could sing falsetto and sew his own shifts.

We taught him how to wrestle and tell jokes.

When his stomach began to swell we renamed him Denise.

One morning we came down to the pen to find him panting, his shift soaked.

We called the Medibus to take him away.

 

I have experience with humans of all ages.

I narrated a documentary about a tribe in the archipelago.

There was one family with four generations.

The great-grandparents had not been culled.

The tribe wore coloured clothes with buttons.

They were hard to track down, the island had no fencing.

Our documentary won a prestigious award.

The island became a destination.

 

I am a skilled handler of humans.

I can realistically mimic voice and cadence.

I can distract creatively.

I can form diagnoses and administer medicine.

I can operate a collar.

Licence rhymes with science and silence and compliance.

The machine will not tolerate a biter.

Thank you for considering my application.

Mave Fellowes is the author of Chaplin & Company (Cape, 2013). Her writing has appeared in Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal, Granta's New Voices, The Paris Review Daily, Stand, and blunt instrument, a limited edition book by the artist Mary Ramsden. She is currently on the second year of a part-time MA in Writing Poetry with The Poetry School/University of Newcastle.