TRIGGER WARNING: This poem contains references to childhood trauma, gun violence, animal death and desecration, and disturbing imagery involving cruelty to animals. It reflects lived experience and may be distressing for some readers. Please read with care.

Apparently, it is not most people’s
experience to be shot at on a
summer morning before the heat
forces children indoors to rest.

I guess we thought it was a mostly
fair fight, since we were lobbing
rocks and they couldn’t hit moving
targets if their lives depended on it.

Two neighbor boys teamed up with
their boredom and a whole summer
of scheming to counter our riotous
fun they were not invited to join.

But they took it too far when they
unburied Daisy Bo Kay, our freshly
dead basset hound, and strung her up
in a tree hoping we’d find her corpse.

She didn’t do anything to deserve
such treatment, just sit and sigh,
howl when we got too rambunctious,
witness the strangeness of our survival.