Frothing dog mouth

Under grow lamps

Waits for permission

Pushes French gown to floor

Piling itself together

Her hands were cold

Never shaking, always empty

They clear-cut the forest you were born in

Two toddlers emerge from grass with fogged over eyes, crawl on all fours, bend and contort on muddy ground.

Captured with surgery-bait that bit their tongues.

Kept in cages for hours at a time, gnashing at steel until bloodied.

‘We could use them for food or we could release them on another property.’

The night I saw you magnetized to your gun

Clutching it like a child in the hall outside his bedroom

A Chinese bolt-action rifle

I didn’t know anything about guns, I just knew it was big

Zane pulled my head to chest to avoid spatter

You held onto that bullet for years

And I held your head as you screamed on dark nights

Shoved Xanax in your crying face

Standing outside the classroom

Where teacher has forgotten you

And from the red mouth,

A melody

other animals don’t kill themselves

they just give up on living

lie down on their snouts in the mud

let the world swallow them

cut and broken from eternal existence 
there is no two

only one and one

it is

or

it isn’t 

and

it isn’t