You wield the hose while your father cleans birds—cold, clear water trickles feathers off grey meat. His thumb huge below the breastbone. You grope inside the sack of doves attending each others’ funerals, give each one a little squeeze. The light pigeons out flecks of violet in their small, flopped heads. When he finishes, you make a pile of guts and bone the dogs can’t keep away from. Mornings before school you hear their coos in a thick mist over the driveway, a pall for your black jelly bracelets as you trudge tile square to square. Pizza with milk. Brownies big as your hand. Don’t turn your head when a boy screams “Hottie!” at you to make his friends laugh. Don’t even twitch. Think of Thursdays when your father drives you thirty minutes to soccer, makes sales calls in his truck and watches you scrimmage, dribble through cones, take penalty kicks, watches so closely he can break down each graze of the ball against your instep. To make him laugh, you take off your shin guards and put your nose deep in their cotton grooves, inhale and tell him they smell like victory. The truck is never quiet. The two of you are wings gliding cool air, purple beads in an orange sky. At school, you are the dove at the bottom of the bag, bodies crushing you against cinderblock walls. You count lines in the floor from Language to History, too dead and muffled to tense at the grasp of fingers. Boys spike thumbs beneath your ribs, turn you inside out.

You meet a boy named for a river. You meet a boy who ignores you at soccer practice and messages you online after school. You meet boys who squeeze their own nipples, telling each other milk will come out. You meet boys you want to touch you, that you want to stare at for hours. You memorize their names, but speak to none. You meet a boy who touches you in a hall of mirrors, your reflections jagged and unfathomable. You meet a boy who touches you with his foot in a public pool. You meet a boy with blue eyes who can barely look at you when you touch him. You meet a boy with glasses, a boy with acne, a boy with scars on his arms, a boy you know is stupid. You are always on the verge of crying. At soccer, boys kick you, slap you, bruise you. Do it again, you pray. You tell lies about them to your friends, to yourself. You meet a boy named for a gun. He sits next to you at the back of the bus. You sit up so straight, his thigh against yours a razor burn. You study its heavy meat. You listen to music, connected by earbuds, wire dangling thin between your heads. He says nothing. He is seventeen and you are fourteen. You barely breathe in the seat. You make yourself empty, your face a darkened screen.

You ask me when the fox will be on the wall,
the one furred corner to corner in raccoons,    
because you haven’t learned the trick
of the deer, how it lifts its eyes, sudden
against grey, how it tips the chandelier
of its antlers and eyes the road, the three leaps
that melt it to a specter of pine, like the does
I saw evenings when my father held me, the wet
orange sparks floating above kudzu
in the dark, their necks invisible as hours,
and I really think it’s better that gunshot
never cracked in your ears, that your fist hasn’t
wrapped the dome of a dove’s head, opened
its gullet to see the swallowed millet—
there’s no need for gravel in your gizzard,
and I’d give you all the dogs for pets, pink slobber,
teeth sheathed in bubblegum lips, the howl
of the grizzled hound as he tracks the red scent
through the snow makes no sense to you,
though you shiver when my Corgi sidles up, push
insistent hands against his nose. I ask if he is fox
or hound, hoping to stump with the pointed ears,
but you are stuck, you ask when my dog will hang
on the wall, emptied like a plastic grocery sack,
no longer his snout between us on the couch—
Make him go away you direct, because Moana has gifted
you crowns of shell, the ocean’s gales against
your tiny, squared shoulders, so I’m just trying
to stay out of your way, a wayward collard
in your organic kale salad, stinking of gunpowder
and taxidermy, eery as the coyote frozen
in a lunge at the dentist that pulled four
molars to make room for incisors
that dropped from my jaw, fangs to rip
the meat from the dove’s breast, grilled
and covered in bacon, to chew my own ankle
from the bear traps sly in winter’s dry foliage.
May you never lift the jowls of a beast
your father slew, never finger the brown
at its gum line, brush its brindle ears,
always see the storybook wolf plush
as your stuffed menagerie, because today
you’ve crept with me into the darkened shack,
your purple sneakers scuffed against
the clapboard as you warmed your shoulders
in pelts peeled from rabbits, knowing what
it might be to cut instead of stitch, how a thing
might bleed and stagger, how a tail might twitch
then still, and how someday you’ll need your teeth:
a smile like feathers, a snarl that snaps like steel.