Boys with faces
like beds full of bloodstains.
Boys with faces
that drown best during winter,
when all the wolves in the town have just been killed.
Father every day goes out with his gun
to see what he can shoot. He leaves the house quietly,
leaves through the screen door, through the porch, his footsteps
soft as my old nightgown:

I was young, then, in that nightgown. Young, but
I remember the small bathroom downstairs
and a weathered hand ****** deep underneath the tight skin
of my chest. Everything seemed ****** then.
Everything seemed six years old vision then and he was my father’s age.

A week later the same weathered hand was on television,
this time dead, this time run over by a drunk boy.  

Tonight I love drunk boys, tonight they are the only boys
I could ever love. With their eyes blank and white, they look just like my mother.
Neither of my parents know about the nightgown. My mother
does not know about my father’s shooting. My father
does not know that I know about his shooting. At night once I was awake
and heard a gunshot and pictured a car belonging to another drunk boy.
In my dreams the same man is dying, his body crushed by a car, over
and over again. In my dream there are no drunk boys (no boys), there is just me.
In my dream I have never had parents and father has no hands
with which to shoot.