By the kitchen window, you bite my neck & hands. I search my intentions: the top of the fridge, the kettle I’d just put on yesterday or years ago. Once my father told me he took a dog out behind his brother’s house to shoot it. It doesn’t matter that the dog ran like a glittering illusion, that the bullet cut a seam into the grass like a bad baseball. Search the intentions & boil them alive. All those lovers you trip over, those fathers you try to slice with the back of a rake: they steal your closet & leave you bare in the yard in a trash bag. They steal back green until camouflage is a plain scone on a sunlit plate. Come on outside, you say—Let’s play. You don’t even have a brother but you take me out behind his house anyway & enlighten me with the hose, begging questions, fleshy memories, green bloody as a tooth. Somewhere the dog breaks through the other side of the forest. There’s nothing there but it keeps running anyway. It’s still running, in fact—now it’s become two dogs—now it has a brother to run with & one day shoot. The hose convulses in your grip as the water pressure-pounds its long gut. I scamper the parted grass like a plastic mouse in a game it’s made to lose.