Theft

Windshields shatter easily with only a small chip

of her mother’s broken porcelain. People often leave

emergency twenties in the glovebox. Her father leaves

love letters in the floorboard

from a woman whose name she doesn’t recognize.

A neighbor keeps a fawn caged inside a chicken-coop.

It skitters, nimble legs and grunting breath

in the dark. She whispers, Come here, I’m sorry.

Angel, come here. Once, she aimed

her rifle at her uncle’s sleeping head.

Drunken, he was dreamless,

bundled in her mother’s deathbed quilt—

already a corpse down her sights.

She let the hammer strike the empty chamber anyway.