When a stray bullet 

is a stray dog, a stray dog 

barks within a chamber of anger 

before runaway legs

unhinge themselves 

from a gun’s steel ownership 

to bite an eight-year-old boy’s 

neck who rides backseat 

on an Oakland freeway. 

His mother’s motherhood 

collapses

onto the car floor. 

She steers the steel capsule

to a hospital’s 

bleeding hemorrhage. 

I knew this boy as a preschooler: 

he smiled inside a classroom’s 

breathing walls.